By Simon Johnson and Johan Ahlander
STOCKHOLM, Oct 8 (Reuters) – Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.
“She was very taken by surprise,” said Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the academy, which awards the prize worth 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million).
“We didn’t have so much time to speak, and all she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind.”
Carson’s work often blends verse, prose, dialogue and translation in a genre-defying mix. Born in Toronto, the 76-year-old has also held Icelandic citizenship since 2022 and has spent considerable time on the Arctic island in recent years.
She is widely known for her translations of classical Greek literature, which heavily influences her work that ranges from opera libretti to literary criticism and verse novels such as “Autobiography of Red” from 1998.
“Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” the Academy said.
“She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work. Her translations from Classical Greek may be regarded as independent works in their own right.”
Her style is exemplified in “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” from 2019, a performance piece which mixes the stories of Helen of Troy in Euripides’ play “Helen” and Marilyn Monroe.
The Academy also praised her ability to explore “the possibilities of writing, a process by which the literary sketch has become of particular value to her”.
“Bearing witness to this is Float (2016), a work consisting of 22 chapbooks on different subjects, capable of being read in any order,” it said.
LIFE WITHOUT PROUST
Often heralded as her greatest work, “Autobiography of Red” demonstrates Carson’s ability to “actualise the classical literary tradition”, the Academy said. In the book, she re-examines age-old questions such as “What happens when you love someone who will ultimately destroy you?”
Tapping into more modern inspirations, Carson reflected on the character of Albertine, one of the narrator Marcel’s love interests in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, in her own book “The Albertine Workout”.
Carson had spent seven years reading Proust’s masterpiece and said in an interview with Canada’s CBC Radio One in 2016 that she suffered withdrawal symptoms after finishing the book, leading her to write “The Albertine Workout” as a way to prolong the experience.
“You think life goes on after Proust, but it seems so grey,” she said.
Carson started taking boxing lessons when she was already in her 70s because of a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. The sport is recommended as a therapy because it helps pay attention to hand-eye coordination and the sequencing of actions.
She reflected on the disease’s impact on her handwriting in an interview at the Louisiana Literary Festival in Denmark in 2024: “I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame … the shame of bad handwriting.”
Carson, who has taught classics at universities in Canada and the United States, has said that she considers herself a visual artist as much as a literary one.
“I think of making a poem as making an object. I have always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language,” she said in the CBC interview.
CARSON HAD BEEN AMONG FAVOURITES THIS YEAR
Carson had been among the favourites to win this year’s prize, according to bookmakers Ladbrokes, and takes a place beside luminaries such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway as a recipient of the award, which often divides opinion among book lovers.
The Academy has been lambasted for ignoring some of the literary titans of the last 120 years such as Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges, criticised for snubbing US authors – though it gave the prize to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016 – and accused of being too obscure in its choices.
Defenders say the Academy has made popular picks, such as Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982 and Doris Lessing in 2007, and argue that part of its task is to highlight lesser-known literary traditions.
Last year’s prize was won by Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in literature, science and peace have been awarded since 1901.
Literature was the fourth of this year’s Nobels to be announced this week, following medicine, physics and chemistry. The peace prize winner will be announced in Oslo on Friday.
($1 = 10.0190 Swedish crowns)
(Reporting by Simon Johnson, Johan Ahlander, Niklas Pollard and Marie Mannes in Stockholm, Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Jonathan Allen in New York and Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw; Editing by Alex Richardson)
