Canadian poet, essayist, and translator Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday in Stockholm.
Carson, 76, was recognized “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
Her genre-defying body of work blends poetry, prose, translation, and classical scholarship. Her best-known books include the 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red, the essay collection Eros the Bittersweet, and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), a performance piece weaving together Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. Her poetry collection Men in the Off Hours won Canada’s Griffin Prize in 2001.
Academy permanent secretary Ingrid Carlberg said Carson was in Iceland — “listening to the wind” — when the Academy reached her with the news.
The prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million). Carson joins a lineage of laureates including Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Bob Dylan. Last year’s prize went to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai.
The literature prize is the fourth Nobel announced this week; the Peace Prize follows on Friday, and the economics prize on Monday.
