Canadian poet, translator, and classical scholar Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday, October 8.
The Academy’s Secretary-General, Ingrid Carlberg, announced 76-year-old Carson as the winner of the prestigious prize on Thursday. She becomes the second Canadian to receive the prize, following Alice Munro’s win in 2013.
Born in Toronto in 1950, Anne Carson is a poet, an essayist, and a classicist who studied Classics at the University of Toronto, completing her doctoral thesis in 1981. She has taught at several universities and built a literary career combining poetry, essays, translation, and classical scholarship. Her writing frequently draws on ancient Greek literature, including the poems of Sappho and plays by Sophocles and Euripides, while exploring contemporary experiences.
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Among her best-known works is Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, published in 1998. Drawing on the Greek myth of Geryon, a red, winged monster, the book reimagines the story through themes of love, rejection, and growing up. Her other works include Eros the Bittersweet (1986), which examines love and desire through ancient Greek literature, and Glass, Irony, and God (1995), which contains The Glass Essay.
In 2016, she published Float, a collection of 22 separate booklets that can be read in different orders. Her 2024 book, Wrong Norma, also brings together different forms of writing. The Nobel Committee described her approach as combining “the philologist’s obsession with words” with “the poet’s desire for new meaning.”