Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Today, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to Canadian author Anne Carson, for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that in playful dialogue with the classical tradition has created new forms for contemporary literature.” The Academy’s permanent secretary called Carson with the news; she was in Iceland, where she was “listening to the wind.” Classic. Trained as a classicist (her bio famously always says she “teaches ancient Greek for a living”), Anne Carson has published many books of poetry, including Wrong Norma (New Directions, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Books Critics Circle Award; Float (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Red Doc> (Alfred A.

Knopf, 2013); The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), winner of the T. Eliot Prize for Poetry; and of course, Autobiography of Red (Alfred A.

She has also published many translations from classical Greek, including If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Knopf, 2002), as well as criticism, like her long essay Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton University Press, 1986). Her works are playful and often ironic, relentlessly experimental and not only genre-bending but form-bending, including Nox (New Directions, 2010), a box containing an accordioned elegy to her estranged brother after his death. Looking for somewhere to start with Anne Carson?

You can’t go wrong with her very funny novel in verse Autobiography of Red.