We're saddened to hear that the Nobel Prize winning poet Louise Glück passed away on the 13th October, aged 80. Glück was the author of thirteen books of poems and two collections of essays, published by Carcanet in the UK. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."
Her other awards include the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her most recent collections include Faithful and Virtuous Night in 2014 and Winter Recipes from the Collective in 2022 which is among her most haunting. Here as in her earlier classic The Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, both spectral and ancient. The ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, sit alongside a sister's death, the light and the dark coalesce. "Some of you will know what I mean," the poet says, and indeed her work continues to make sense of the world. This is a poetic voice which will live on, containing "all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last."