Anne Carson
Canadian poet and essayist, classical scholar and professor, Anne Carson has been named the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in literature. The prize was announced on Oct. 8 in Stockholm by the Swedish Academy.
Carson, 76, is the third Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Alice Munro won the prize in 2013 and Saul Bellow, who lived most of his life in the U.S., won in 1976.
Last year’s winner of the prize was Hungarian writer and novelist László Krasznahorkai.
Carson, along with Chinese writer Can Xue, had been among the favourites for the prize this year.
The award comes with a purse of 12m Swedish Krona – almost $1.8 million Canadian.
The jury cited Carson for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
American literary critic Daphne Merkin has called Carson “one of the great pasticheurs” for her dense and allusive work informed by classical scholarship and “unique fusion of various poetic forms and free verse with prose.” In their citation of Carson’s winning title Red Doc>, the 2014 Griffin Prize jury wrote that “Anne Carson continues to redefine what a book of poetry can be.”
Carson has published more than 20 books of poems, essays, libretti, prose criticism, and verse novels. She is perhaps best known for her “novels in verse,” Autobiography of Red (1998) and The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001). Other work include Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Short Talks (1992), Nox (2010), Red Doc> (2013) – the “sequel” to Autobiography of Red – Float (2016), and H of H Playbook (2021). In addition to her own work, she has published well-regarded translations of classical writers, including of Sappho and Euripides, notably An Oresteia (2009).
Carson won the Griffin Prize for poetry twice, taking home the inaugural prize in 2001 for Men in the Off Hours and in 2014 for Red Doc>. In 2020, she won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language poetry for Norma Jeane Baker of Troy.
In 2001, Carson was the first woman to win the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She has won the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and she has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. She is a member of the Order of Canada.
Carson has taught at several North American universities, including McGill University and the University of Michigan. Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind, an essay by Carson on hands and handwriting, is due to be published by New Directions in early 2027.
Correction, Oct. 8: Anne Carson is the third Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, not the second as originally stated. Saul Bellow was the first Canadian to win the prize.
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