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Canadian poet Anne Carson, an essayist and classicist who gives mysticism and antiquity a modern twist in her writing on love, desire and despair, won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy, the Stockholm-based institution that selects the laureate, honored the 76-year-old "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature," according to its announcement. An oeuvre is an artist's complete body of work.
The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Ingrid Carlberg, said she had briefly spoken to Carson. "We didn't have so much time to speak. All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she's listening to the wind. She was taken by surprise, but very happy. I could hear that in her voice," she stated.
The Academy said almost all her literary production "has centered upon the intersection between the philologist's obsession with words and the poet's desire for new meaning". A philologist is a scholar who studies language in historical texts.
It singled out her poem "Nox," printed on one continuous sheet of paper in homage to her dead brother, as "an unforgettable work." Carson has been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate for years.
Many literary observers had predicted the award would go to a woman this year, given the frequent criticism directed at the Academy because of the overrepresentation of Western white men among its picks. There have been just 19 women laureates out of 122 since the Nobel Prize in Literature was first awarded in 1901.
A 2018 sex assault scandal involving one of the jurors left the Academy in tatters, and more than half of its 18 members were replaced. Since then, every other literature laureate has been a woman.
Last year, the award went to Hungary's Laszlo Krasznahorkai, whose works explore themes of postmodern dystopia. The Nobel Prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a $1.2 million prize sum.
Carson will receive the award from King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.
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