The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, essayist and translator who has spent four decades rewriting the Greek classics for modern readers.
Permanent secretary Ingrid Carlberg announced the decision in Stockholm on October 8, praising a “bold and inventive oeuvre” that the Academy said had drawn on the classical tradition to create new forms for contemporary writing.
Anders Olsson, who chairs the Academy’s Nobel committee, said Carson’s work showed a rare feel for the ties between body and soul, and between “the living and the dead”. He described her experimental style as that of an innovator in contemporary prose.
Carson was born in Toronto in 1950 and trained as a classicist. Her doctoral work on Sappho became Eros the Bittersweet, published in 1986 and still the way into her writing for many readers.
She is best known for Autobiography of Red, a 1998 verse novel built on the myth of Geryon, and for Nox, an elegy for her brother published in 2010 as a single folded concertina of text and photographs.
Her translations cover 10 ancient Greek tragedies, among them work by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. She has taught at McGill, Michigan, Princeton and New York University, and has worked with dancers, musicians and visual artists.
European readers have known her for some time. Carson took Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2020, and her books circulate widely in Spanish, Catalan, German and Italian translation.
She had also been a fixture on the bookmakers’ lists for more than a decade, usually alongside the Chinese novelist Can Xue, who was again among the favourites this year.
Carson is the 19th woman to win the prize and the first Canadian laureate since Alice Munro in 2013.
The award follows last year’s prize for the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai and returns the Academy to the English-speaking world, which now accounts for around 30 of the 123 laureates. French and German writers follow at a distance, while most of Europe’s smaller literatures remain unrepresented.
The prize is worth SEK 12 million (about €1.07 million) and will be presented in Stockholm on December 10. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announces the peace prize in Oslo on October 9, with US President Donald Trump among the bookmakers’ favourites.
