“Bold, Inventive” Professor Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Anne Carson, a poet and essayist who has taught at some of the most selective universities in the United States and Canada, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday. In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy cited her “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

Carson’s extensive body of work reflects a range of themes and influences, including classical Greek and Roman literature, Virginia Woolf, and her own experiences. According to the Associated Press, “Autobiography of Red,” which reimagined the myth of Hercules and the monster Geryon as a love story, has sold nearly 100,000 copies in the United States alone since it debuted in 1998. Born in Toronto in 1950, she has also written translations of numerous class Greek poems and plays, including Sophocles’s Electra and Antigone and Euripides’s Bakkhai.

“Almost all her literary production has centered upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel literature committee, told the AP. 

Carson earned a doctorate in classics from the University of Toronto in 1981 and taught literature and writing at University of Calgary, McGill University, the University of Michigan, New York University and Princeton University.

“The NYU Creative Writing Program was incredibly fortunate to have had the singularly brilliant and visionary writer Anne Carson on faculty for 13 years as Distinguished Writer in Residence,” Deborah Landau, director of NYU’s creative writing program, wrote in a news release congratulating Carson. She recalled how Carson and her romantic partner and collaborator, Robert Currie, “famously taught a graduate workshop called ‘Egocircus,’ which allowed our M.F.A .students to collaborate with her on a range of artistic projects.”

When Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, reached Carson by phone Thursday, “All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind,” Carlberg told reporters. Carson, who lives in Iceland with Currie, told a local news outlet that the conversation was “rather halting.”  

“I think they’re all crazy,” she said. “They have the usual questions, and I have no answers.”