Canadian Poet Anne Carson Wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature

Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, essayist, translator and classicist, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy announced the decision in Stockholm on Thursday, and the official press release cites her "bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature."

Carson is 76. The Academy's permanent secretary, Ingrid Carlberg, said she broke the news by phone shortly before the announcement and that Carson was in Iceland, "listening to the wind." "She was taken by surprise but very happy. I could hear that in her voice," Carlberg said, according to the BBC. Carson, speaking to Iceland's public broadcaster RUV, joked that the judges were "crazy." The prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor, about 1.2 million dollars.

Who is Anne Carson?

She was born in Toronto on 21 June 1950, according to the Nobel Foundation's biographical page, has been a professor of classics for more than three decades, and now lives in Michigan, with Icelandic citizenship since 2022. Her writing refuses to stay in one genre. The Associated Press, in a report carried by NBC News, described works that mix poetry, essay and fiction and draw on ancient Greek and Roman literature.

Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, called the win "an extraordinary achievement and a proud moment for Canada," praising her "wit, imagination, and a style entirely her own."

Which Anne Carson books should you read first?

The Academy and the wire reports named a handful. Eros the Bittersweet looks at the pleasure and pain of desire in ancient Greek writing. Autobiography of Red is a verse novel. Men in the Off Hours, a collection of poetry and prose, won Canada's Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a performance piece, sets Marilyn Monroe beside Helen of Troy. Her translations, which the Academy said "may be regarded as independent works in their own right," include If Not, Winter, built from the fragments of Sappho, and versions of Sophocles' Electra and Antigone and Euripides' Bakkhai. Her most recent book, Wrong Norma (2024), gathers pieces from The Paris Review and The New Yorker with her own drawings.