Anne Carson Wins 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature
STOCKHOLM — Anne Carson, the Canadian poet and classicist whose poems, essays and translations fuse verse, prose, drama and scholarship into startling new forms, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy said it was honoring Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” The announcement in Stockholm was read by Permanent Secretary Ingrid Carlberg, her first in the role.
Carson, 76, was born in Toronto and earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Toronto. She has taught classics and comparative literature at universities including McGill, the University of Michigan, Princeton and New York University, according to biographical profiles.
Her books move freely across genres. Autobiography of Red, her 1998 novel in verse, retells the Greek myth of Geryon as the coming-of-age story of a contemporary boy. She has translated ancient Greek poets, including the fragments of Sappho, and her 2019 performance piece Norma Jeane Baker of Troy wove together the Euripides play Helen and the life of Marilyn Monroe, Reuters reported.
Long before Stockholm called, Carson had collected many of literature’s highest honors. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000, the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2001, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2020 and the Griffin Poetry Prize twice. The University of Toronto, her alma mater, celebrated the win as a proud moment for the university community.
She is the second Canadian to win the literature prize after Alice Munro, who was honored in 2013. Last year’s prize went to the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai.
The Sweden Herald reported that in the days before the announcement, bookmakers had listed Carson alongside the Chinese writer Can Xue as the leading contenders.
The prize carries a purse of 12 million Swedish crowns, about $1.2 million, and will be formally presented in Stockholm on Dec. 10.