Anne Carson

Anne Carson was born in Toronto in 1950, the daughter of a banker, and grew up in a series of small Canadian towns. A high-school Latin teacher introduced her to ancient Greek and tutored her privately. She left the University of Toronto twice before completing her degrees there, culminating in a doctorate in classics in 1981, and spent a year at St Andrews studying Greek metrics. Her academic career took her to Calgary, Princeton, Emory, McGill, Michigan and New York University, among others.

Eros the Bittersweet (1986), developed from her doctoral thesis, read Sappho’s word for love’s “sweetbitter” double nature as the key to a theory of desire, and announced a career in which scholarship and poetry would be inseparable. Glass, Irony and God (1995) includes “The Glass Essay”, which moves between Emily Brontë, a failed love affair and her father’s decline. Autobiography of Red (1998) retells a fragmentary Greek myth as a novel in verse about a winged red boy in love; The Beauty of the Husband (2001) made her the first woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize. She has translated Sappho and ten Greek tragedies, and Nox (2010), an epitaph for her brother, was published as an accordion-folded facsimile notebook in a box. Often working with her husband, the artist Robert Currie, she treats the book itself as a medium to be reinvented.

Her honours include two Griffin Poetry Prizes, a MacArthur Fellowship and the Princess of Asturias Award. In 2022 she and Currie were granted Icelandic citizenship, and in 2024 she disclosed that she has Parkinson’s disease. The Nobel Prize, announced on 8 October 2026, honours a bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.