Canadian poet Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Carson, 76, received the award on Thursday for what the Swedish Academy called her “bold and inventive oeuvre.” The prize, worth 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million), was announced in Stockholm while the Toronto-born writer was staying at her home in Iceland.
“Crazy, I think they’re all crazy,” Carson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV when asked how she was feeling after learning she had won. “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book.”
Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Academy, said Carson had been taken completely by surprise when called with the news. “All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind,” Carlberg told a press conference in Stockholm after the announcement.
The Academy’s citation recognized Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” It noted that almost all her literary production has centered upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning. “She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work,” the Academy stated. “Her translations from Classical Greek may be regarded as independent works in their own right.”
Swedish novelist Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the award committee, highlighted Carson’s resistance to categorization. “Genre is something for booksellers. It’s something you do in order to appeal to an audience and make them buy books,” he said. “And on what shelf do you put Anne Carson’s books? It’s on a shelf of her own. That’s what I like about her.”
Carson’s work spans opera libretti, literary criticism, and verse novels, with classical Greek literature heavily influencing her genre-defying mix of verse, prose, and dialogue. Her 1998 book “Autobiography of Red” is often heralded as her greatest work, demonstrating what the Academy called her ability to “actualize the classical literary tradition.” In the book, she re-examines age-old questions such as “What happens when you love someone who will ultimately destroy you?”
Her 2019 performance piece “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” exemplifies her distinctive style, mixing the stories of Helen of Troy in Euripides’ play “Helen” with Marilyn Monroe. She has also drawn on more modern inspirations, reflecting on Albertine from Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” in her book “The Albertine Workout.”
Carson spent seven years reading Proust’s masterpiece and told Canada’s CBC Radio One in 2016 that she suffered withdrawal symptoms after finishing. “You think life goes on after Proust, but it seems so gray,” she said in the interview. She wrote “The Albertine Workout” as a way to prolong the experience.
The writer, who has taught classics at universities in Canada and the United States, considers herself a visual artist as much as a literary one. “I think of making a poem as making an object. I have always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language,” she said in the CBC interview.
Carson also told the Icelandic broadcaster on Thursday that poetry may be more attuned to modern life than long-form writing. “I think it’s probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster and everybody is in a hurry so basically it’s good because it is brief,” she said.
When asked by the Nobel Committee about her own sources of inspiration, however, she listed ancient Greek poet Homer, author of “The Odyssey” epic. As to how the classical stories she has reinterpreted might be relevant to modern audiences, she said: “I don’t think I’m interested in relevance.”
Carson started taking boxing lessons in her 70s after a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis, as the sport is recommended as a therapy for hand-eye coordination and sequencing of actions. She reflected on the disease’s impact at the Louisiana Literary Festival in Denmark in 2024: “I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame … the shame of bad handwriting.”
Carson and her husband, artist Robert Currie, first came to Iceland after the 2008 banking collapse and gradually spent more time there. She has held citizenship of Iceland since 2022. “We got to know people and we liked the people,” Carson told Iceland Review in 2023. Currie told the magazine Iceland was one of only two places that immediately felt like home to him, the other being New York City in the 1970s.
Carson had been among the favorites for this year’s prize and joins past recipients including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alice Munro, and Ernest Hemingway. Last year’s prize was won by Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
The peace prize winner will be announced in Oslo on Friday.