Canadian Poet Anne Carson Wins 2026 Nobel Prize In Literature

(Canadian writer Anne Carson. Photo by CNN)

Canadian writer Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Prize announced on Thursday.

The Swedish Academy praised her bold and inventive body of work, saying it has created new forms of modern writing through a playful conversation with classical literature.

The 76-year-old was born in Toronto in 1950 and studied Classics at the University of Toronto.

She is known for mixing poetry, translation and classical studies, and she often takes stories from ancient Greek writing and presents them in fresh ways.

She has translated the poems of Sappho and plays by Sophocles and Euripides.

Her work also reaches into theatre, opera and dance, and she has written poetry, essays and verse novels.

Her best known book is Autobiography of Red, published in 1998.

It is based on the Greek myth of Geryon, a red, winged monster, and turns it into a modern story about love, rejection and growing up.

Her other works include Eros the Bittersweet, Glass, Irony, and God, Float and Wrong Norma.

She has also won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship.

The Nobel Committee said she combines the philologist's obsession with words and the poet's desire for new meaning.

In simple terms, she joins the careful study of language with the freedom of poetry.

Carson is the second Canadian to win the prize, after Alice Munro in 2013.

For Nigeria, her win brings back the story of Wole Soyinka, who won in 1986 and remains the only Nigerian Nobel laureate in literature.

He was also the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to receive the award.

She will receive the prize in Stockholm in December.