Canadian poet, translator and classicist Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday.
The Academy honoured Carson, 76, for bold and inventive work that, in a playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.
Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson has taught ancient Greek and classics at universities including Princeton, McGill, Berkeley, Michigan and New York University, combining teaching with writing and translation. Her work spans poetry, the novel in verse, libretto, literary criticism and the essay.
Language is at the centre of her writing. The Academy said almost all her work grows out of the meeting between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning. Carson herself has described the etymology of words as the starting point of her work. She brings classical texts, myths and figures into the present while searching for new literary forms.
Her best-known works include ‘Autobiography of Red’, ‘The Beauty of the Husband’, ‘Decreation’ and ‘Nox’. ‘Autobiography of Red’ takes the ancient Greek myth of Geryon and Heracles from Stesichorus’s ‘Geryoneis’ and turns it into a modern coming-of-age story, in a hybrid of novel and poetry. She has also translated and adapted ancient Greek writers, including Sophocles and Euripides.
Carson had been among the favourites with bookmakers in the days before the announcement, along with writers such as Can Xue and Haruki Murakami. The 2025 prize went to Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
Four of her books have been published in Greek. ‘Short Talks’ (Patakis, 2013), translated by Haris Vlavianos, is a bilingual edition. ‘Eros the Bittersweet’ (Doma, 2019) explores love through ancient Greek literature, philology and personal experience. ‘The Beauty of the Husband’ (Patakis, 2023), subtitled ‘A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos’, was translated by Eftychia Panagiotou and Dimitris Athinakis and also appears in a bilingual edition. ‘Autobiography of Red’ (Patakis, January 2026) was also translated by Vlavianos.
The prize will be presented in Stockholm in December.
