The Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson (aged 76) has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize committee praised "her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature". The Nobel Prize is awarded for a lifetime's body of work and the winner receives 12 million Swedish kronor (£900,000).
Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her previous awards and honours include the T.S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
Her renowned work The Autobiography of Red (1998) follows a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. A queer coming-of-age love story and a Greek myth retold, it is an extraordinary, moving and modern epic poem. Her many other books of poetry and translation include Red > which resumes the story, Nox (2010) a facsimile of a handmade book created after the death of her brother - coming to terms with loss through the lens of Poem 101 by Catullus and the innovative pamphlet boxset Float which was awarded a PBS Recommendation in 2016.
Her latest book The Wrong Norma forms a collection of writings about vastly disparate topics from Joseph Conrad to snow. As Anne Carson claimed, "The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them wrong". It was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
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