Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm.
The Story
Anne Carson, a Toronto-born poet, essayist and translator, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, at age 76.
In remarks attributed to Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the author was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the academy reached her to notify her of the prize. Carlberg said Carson “was very taken by surprise.”
The Swedish Academy said Carson’s work plays with genres and blends the classical and modern, drawing on themes and stories from ancient Greek and Roman literature. Her books include “Eros the Bittersweet,” “Autobiography of Red,” “Men in the Off Hours,” and “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” and the academy noted her translations of classical Greek texts can stand as independent works.
Anders Olsson, chair of the literature committee, said Carson’s writing centres on the meeting point between a philologist’s obsession with words and a poet’s drive for new meaning, adding that her contrasts of influences from ancient Greece to writers such as John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Emily Brontë “leads to playful and ironic works” across genres and art forms.
Carson has taught classics at several North American universities and has lived in Iceland, where she and her husband, Robert Currie, were granted citizenship in 2022. The Nobel announcement came from the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
The Nobel prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million) per prize. Earlier this week, separate Nobel awards were announced for medicine, physics and chemistry, with the peace prize scheduled for Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences set for Monday.
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