This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to Canada’s Anne Carson, an essayist and classicist who brings a modern twist to mysticism and antiquity in her writings about love, desire and despair.
The 76-year-old won “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.
Carson is widely known for her translations of classical Greek literature – which heavily influence her work – ranging from opera librettos to literary criticism and verse novels, such as Autobiography of Red from 1998.
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.
Ingrid Carlberg, the academy’s permanent secretary, said she had briefly spoken to Carson.
“We didn’t have so much time to speak. All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind,” Carlberg said. “She was taken by surprise, but very happy. I could hear that in her voice.”
In an interview with public broadcaster RUV in Iceland, where Carson has lived part of the year since 2008 and has become a citizen, she said of the decision to honour her: “They’re all crazy.”
Asked by RUV on a blustery roadside if she thought the Nobel would change her readership, Carson, holding tightly to her cap so it would not blow away, replied: “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my books.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday lauded Carson’s win. Her works featured “wit, imagination and a style entirely her own”, Carney said on social media.
“She has brought ancient stories to new audiences and transformed the way we think about literature,” he said, calling the award “an extraordinary achievement and a proud moment for Canada”.
Carson was born in 1950 in Toronto. She was educated at the University of Toronto and has taught at several universities in North America, including McGill, Michigan, New York and Princeton.
A professor of classics with a background in dead languages, literature, anthropology and history, Carson was described by The New York Times in 2001 as “one of the great pasticheurs”. Her unique contemporary poetry earned her several key literary prizes in the 1990s, including the 1996 Lannan Award and the 1997 Pushcart Prize.
The academy said almost all of Carson’s literary production “has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning”. It singled out her poem Nox, printed on one continuous sheet of paper in homage to her brother who died in 2000, as “an unforgettable work”.
“Palpable here is a deep sense of loss that works its way up from below. The result is a creation as sculptural as it is literary, an epitaph in the form of a box containing an accordion-fold-out of pictures, letters and other written texts dedicated to her dead brother,” the academy said.
Carson’s wide-ranging influences, from the ancient Greeks to John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Emily Bronte, led “to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and art forms”, said Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Literature Committee.
Carson 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 an interview with Canada’s CBC Radio One in 2016.
Poetry, she says, may be more attuned to the fast modern-day life than long-form writing.
“I think it’s probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster and everybody is in a hurry so basically it’s good because it is brief,” she told the Icelandic broadcaster on Thursday.
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.
Last year, the academy picked Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
The academy has been lambasted for ignoring some of the literary titans of the last 120 years such as Leo Tolstoy, Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges, criticised for snubbing American 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, arguing that part of its task is to highlight lesser-known literary traditions and encourage readers to broaden their horizons.
There have been just 19 women laureates out of 122 since the Nobel Literature Prize was first awarded in 1901. The Literature Prize is the fourth award announced each year, following the Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry.
The Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Oslo, the only Nobel award not presented in Stockholm. The week concludes on Monday with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Each Nobel Prize this year carries a cash award of 12 million Swedish kronor (about US$1.2 million). The prizes will be formally presented to the winners at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish inventor and Nobel Foundation founder Alfred Nobel (1833–1896).
Reporting by Agence France-Presse, Reuters, Associated Press and dpa
