Canadian poet Anne Carson wins 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature

Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday.

The academy honoured her “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”. The prize is worth 12 million Swedish crowns, about $1.2 million.

“She was very taken by surprise. 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,” said Ingrid Carlberg, the academy’s permanent secretary, The Express Tribune reported. Carson had been among the favourites for this year’s prize, according to the bookmaker Ladbrokes.

A writer who breaks genres

Carson, a poet and essayist, is known for work that mixes verse, prose, dialogue and translation in ways that defy easy labels. Her translations of classical Greek literature shape much of her writing, which ranges from opera libretti and literary criticism to verse novels such as Autobiography of Red.

Her style shows in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), a performance piece that weaves together the story of Helen of Troy from Euripides’ play Helen with that of Marilyn Monroe.

Her other well-known works include:

• Plainwater
• Wrong Norma
• The Beauty of the Husband, which in 2001 made her the first woman to win the TS Eliot Prize, according to Geo News

Life and career

Carson was born in Toronto in 1950, Geo News reported. She earned a PhD in classics, publishing her doctoral thesis, Odi et Amo Ergo Sum, in 1981, and has combined poetry with translation and teaching at several universities. Born in Toronto, she has also held Icelandic citizenship since 2022.

“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. Her translations from classical Greek, it added, “may be regarded as independent works in their own right”. The academy also highlighted The Glass Essay, from Glass, Irony and God (1995), as an example of how she uses the long poem to blur the lines between genres.

She has spoken publicly about living with Parkinson’s disease. In a 2024 essay in the London Review of Books, she wrote that her handwriting had “disintegrated” as a result.

According to Geo News, she is the third Canadian-born writer to win the prize, after Saul Bellow in 1976 and Alice Munro in 2013.

A prize that divides opinion

Carson joins past laureates such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway. The award often divides book lovers. The academy has been criticised for overlooking literary giants such as Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges, for snubbing US authors, and for obscure choices, although it gave the prize to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016.

Its defenders point to popular picks such as Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982 and Doris Lessing in 2007, and argue that part of the academy’s job is to bring lesser-known literary traditions to wider audiences.

Last year’s prize went to Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai, whom the American critic Susan Sontag called the “master of the apocalypse”.

About the prize

The Nobel prizes were set up in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, and have been awarded for achievements in literature, science and peace since 1901.

This article draws on reporting by Dawn, Geo News and The Express Tribune.