The 76-year-old was honoured for writing that mixes verse, prose and translation from ancient Greek. She was in Iceland, “listening to the wind”, when the call came.
Canadian poet Anne Carson, whose work moves between verse, prose, dialogue and translation, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for what the Swedish Academy called her “bold and inventive oeuvre”.
Carson, 76, is the first Canadian to win the prize since the short story writer Alice Munro in 2013. The award is worth 12 million Swedish kronor ($1.2m).
Asked by Icelandic broadcaster RÚV how she felt about the news, Carson said: “Crazy, I think they’re all crazy.”
“I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book,” she added.
Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Carson had been taken by surprise when she was called with the result.
“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.
In its citation, the Academy said it was honouring Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
“Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” the Academy said.
It added that Carson had identified the origins of words as the starting point for all her work, and that her translations from classical Greek “may be regarded as independent works in their own right”.
Steve Sem-Sandberg, a Swedish novelist who sits on the prize committee, said her books did not fit any single category.
“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.”
Born in Toronto, Carson is best known for her translations of classical Greek literature, which shape much of her own writing. Her output ranges from opera libretti and literary criticism to verse novels.
The Academy singled out Autobiography of Red (1998), often described as her finest book, saying it showed her ability to “actualise the classical literary tradition”.
The verse novel retells the Greek myth of Geryon, a winged red monster killed by Herakles, as a modern love story. It turns on the question of what happens when you love someone who will ultimately destroy you.
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), a performance piece, merges the story of Helen in Euripides’ play Helen with the life of Marilyn Monroe.
Carson spent seven years reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She told CBC Radio One in 2016 that she suffered withdrawal symptoms when she finished, and wrote The Albertine Workout, about the narrator’s lover Albertine, to prolong the experience.
“You think life goes on after Proust, but it seems so grey,” she said.
Her earlier honours include the 2001 TS Eliot Prize for The Beauty of the Husband, which made her the first woman to win it.
Carson began boxing lessons in her 70s after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The sport is often recommended as therapy for the condition because it trains hand-eye coordination and the sequencing of movements.
Speaking at the Louisiana literature festival in Denmark in 2024, she described the disease’s effect on her handwriting: “I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame … the shame of bad handwriting.”
Carson, who has taught classics at universities in Canada and the US, has said she sees herself as a visual artist as much as a writer.
“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.
On Thursday she told RÚV that poetry may suit modern life better than prose. “It’s faster and everybody is in a hurry so basically it’s good because it is brief,” she said.
Asked by the Nobel committee about her own inspirations, she named the ancient Greek poet Homer. On whether the classical stories she reworks matter to modern readers, she said: “I don’t think I’m interested in relevance.”
Carson and her husband, the artist Robert Currie, first went to Iceland after the country’s 2008 banking collapse and gradually spent more time there. “We got to know people and we liked the people,” she told Iceland Review in 2023.
She has held Icelandic citizenship since 2022. Currie told the magazine that Iceland was one of only two places that had immediately felt like home to him, the other being New York in the 1970s.
Literature was the fourth of this year’s Nobel prizes to be announced, after medicine, physics and chemistry. The peace prize will be announced in Oslo on Friday.
The prizes were set up under the will of the Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901.
Carson had been among the favourites this year. She joins past literature laureates including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ernest Hemingway and Munro.
She is the first writer best known as a poet to win since the American Louise Glück in 2020. Last year’s prize went to the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai.