TORONTO — Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said Thursday in Stockholm.The 76-year-old poet, translator and classics scholar was cited “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 $1.7 million Canadian. She will receive it from King Carl XVI Gustaf on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.Carson, a Member of the Order of Canada, is the third Canadian to win the literature prize given to a living writer. Alice Munro won in 2013. Saul Bellow, born in Lachine, Que., and raised in the United States, won in 1976. She disclosed in a London Review of Books essay in 2024 that she has Parkinson’s disease.The academy said she was in Iceland, “listening to the wind,” when permanent secretary Ingrid Carlberg reached her, and that she was surprised. Committee member Steve Sem-Sandberg said of her work, “Nobody writes like her. Nobody would dare to.”She is a Toronto native. She enrolled at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto in 1968, left to try graphic design, and came back to study Greek poetry. She earned a bachelor’s in 1974, a master’s in 1975 and a PhD in 1981. She was the university’s Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory in 2020 and received an honorary degree in 2012. University president Melanie Woodin called the prize a proud moment for the alumni..The academy said almost all of her work sits at the intersection of the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s search for new meaning. She has said the etymology of a word is the starting point. She told CBC in 2011: “Making a poem is making an object. I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language.”Her first book of poetry, Canicula di Anna, was published in 1984. Eros the Bittersweet, a book of essays, followed in 1986. Autobiography of Red (1998) turns a Greek myth about Herakles and a red winged monster into a coming-of-age story. Glass, Irony and God and Nox are among the other books the academy singled out. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which sets Marilyn Monroe against Euripides’s Helen, won a Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2020.She was the first woman to win Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize, for The Beauty of the Husband.
