Anne Carson wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to a Canadian classicist who spent her career making the ancient world speak in a modern voice.

Anne Carson, 76, won the prize Thursday "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature," the Swedish Academy said. Carson is a poet, essayist and translator whose work refuses to stay in one genre, blending verse, prose, dialogue and translation in combinations that critics have spent decades trying to categorize. Her best known work is "Autobiography of Red," a 1998 verse novel that retells the Greek myth of Geryon, the winged red monster slain by Heracles, as a tender contemporary story. "Norma Jeane Baker of Troy" from 2019 braids Euripides' Helen with Marilyn Monroe.

"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," said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature. Carson trained as a classicist, taught at universities for years, and has translated Sappho and other Greek poets with a directness that made the ancient texts feel written yesterday.

The prize is worth 12 million Swedish crowns, about $1.2 million. She joins a line that runs from Solzhenitsyn to Hemingway to last year's winner, Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The week's other science prizes went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for medicine on Monday, Francis Halzen for physics on Tuesday, and Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for chemistry on Wednesday. The Peace Prize is announced Friday, and the economics prize Monday.