As per the statement of the Swedish Academy, Canadian writer, poet and essayist Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
Born in 1950 in Toronto, Canada, Carson is primarily known for her poetry, poetic prose and works of criticism. Her most well known include “Eros the Bittersweet”, an essay describing the concept of eros in classical Greece, “Men in the Off Hours”, a Griffin Prize-winning collection of poems and “Red Doc>”, a mixed genre book combining elements of prose, poetry and drama, for which she had been awarded a T.S. Elliot Prize in 2013.
While Carson was one of the projected possible winners for the Nobel, she was not the forerunner. The favourite was Chinese author Can Xue, followed closely by Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon. A strong expectation was also on a possible win from a South American or Caribbean writer, such as Cristina Rivera Garza or Enrique Vila-Matas, as there has been no winner from that region since 2010, when the prize went to Mario Vargas Llosa. Interestingly, another Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood, also placed higher in the odds.
Carson has been a citizen of Iceland since 2022. She is currently the only living Literature Nobel winner for either Canada or Iceland. For her win, she will receive 12 million Swedish kronor, which is roughly equivalent to €1.1 million.
