Louise Glück

Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island, the elder of two surviving daughters in a family descended from Hungarian and Russian Jewish immigrants. In high school she developed anorexia nervosa, and the years of psychoanalysis that followed shaped both her life and her poetry. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and then poetry workshops at Columbia, where Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz became her mentors, but never took a degree. Her first collection, Firstborn, appeared in 1968.

Her mature voice emerged in The House on Marshland and The Triumph of Achilles: spare, declarative lines that refuse ornament and comfort. The death of her father prompted Ararat (1990); The Wild Iris (1992), in which flowers, a gardener and an elusive god address one another, won the Pulitzer Prize. Myth served her as a way to speak of private experience at a slight distance — Odysseus and Penelope in Meadowlands, Persephone in Averno — and her subjects remained the large, simple ones: desire, betrayal, mortality, the self’s estrangement from its own life. Faithful and Virtuous Night won the National Book Award in 2014.

She taught for many years at Williams College and later at Yale and Stanford, and served as US Poet Laureate in 2003–04. The Nobel Prize in 2020 honoured her unmistakable poetic voice, which with austere beauty makes individual existence universal. Winter Recipes from the Collective followed in 2021. She died of cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2023, at the age of eighty.