Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature for a genre-defying body of work that combines poetry, prose, translation and classical literature to create new forms of contemporary writing.
The Swedish Academy, which announced the award on Thursday, honoured the 76-year-old Carson for her “bold and inventive oeuvre” and her contribution to creating new forms of contemporary literature through her engagement with classical traditions.
Carson, who was born in Toronto and has a home in Iceland, said she was surprised by the award after receiving the news while on the Arctic island.
The prize carries an award of 12 million Swedish crowns, about $1.2 million.
Carson is widely recognised for her translations of classical Greek literature, which have strongly influenced her writing across poetry, literary criticism, opera libretti and verse novels.
Her best-known works include Autobiography of Red, published in 1998, which reworks elements of Greek mythology, and The Albertine Workout, inspired by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
The Swedish Academy said Carson’s work was characterised by the intersection of a scholar’s attention to words and a poet’s search for new meanings. It also praised her translations from Classical Greek as independent literary works.
Swedish novelist Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the Nobel award committee, described Carson as a writer who defies conventional literary categories.
Her 2019 work Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, for example, combines the story of Helen of Troy from Euripides’ play Helen with the life of American actress Marilyn Monroe.
Carson has taught classics at universities in Canada and the United States and has described herself as a visual artist as well as a writer. She has said she views poems as objects that can be entered through language.
The writer has also drawn on her personal experiences in her work. She began boxing lessons in her 70s after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a condition that has affected her handwriting.
Carson and her husband, artist Robert Currie, have spent considerable time in Iceland since first visiting after the country’s 2008 banking crisis. She became an Icelandic citizen in 2022.
Asked about the relevance of the classical stories she has reinterpreted for modern audiences, Carson told the Nobel Committee: “I don’t think I’m interested in relevance.”
Carson becomes the latest recipient of the literature prize, joining previous winners including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway.
She is the fourth Nobel laureate announced this week, following the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry. The Nobel Peace Prize is due to be announced in Oslo on Friday.
