By Prisca Sam-Duru

STOCKHOLM — Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Carson, 76, was honoured “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.

The prize was announced in Stockholm, making Carson the first Canadian literature laureate since Alice Munro won in 2013 and the 20th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature since the award was established in 1901.

The Nobel Prize in Literature, regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, recognises a writer’s body of work. This year’s prize carries a cash award of 12 million Swedish kronor, about £900,000 or $1.2 million.

Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson is a trained classicist who has taught for more than three decades at universities in North America. She currently lives between Michigan in the United States and Iceland, where she and her husband, Robert Currie, were granted citizenship in 2022.

She is renowned for work that blurs the boundaries between poetry, fiction, essay, scholarship and translation.

Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, Anders Olsson, said Carson had “broken away from lyrical poetry bound to the narrative self and inspired new forms of contemporary literature.”

“This method of writing leads to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and artforms,” Olsson said.

Among Carson’s notable works are Eros the Bittersweet (1986), The Glass Essay (1995), the verse novel Autobiography of Red (1998), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), Nox (2010) and Float (2016).

She is also acclaimed for translations that have been praised as works in their own right, including her rendering of Sappho’s fragments in If Not, Winter, as well as translations of Sophocles’ Elektra and Antigone and Euripides’ Bakkhai.

Her work has also extended into theatre and performance. In 2019, her performance piece Norma Jeane Baker of Troy drew a parallel between Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe.

In 2021, she released The Trojan Women: A Comic, a graphic retelling of Euripides’ tragedy, while her translation of Sophocles’ Elektra, starring Brie Larson, was staged in London’s West End last year.

The Swedish Academy also praised Carson’s collaborations with visual artists, choreographers, and theatre and opera directors.

“Her collaborations demonstrate the freedom with which she relates to literary expectations and rule systems,” Olsson said, adding that this freedom underpinned “the outstanding importance her work since the 1990s has had for the international art and literature scene.”

Announcing the award, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Ingrid Carlberg said she had reached Carson in Iceland, where the poet was “listening to the wind.”

“She was taken by surprise but very happy. I could hear that in her voice,” Carlberg said.