Anne Carson

Anne Patricia Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950. She did all her training at the University of Toronto, from her bachelor's degree to a PhD in classics finished in 1981, with a one-year break at the University of St Andrews in Scotland to study Greek meter. The dissertation became her first book of criticism, Eros the Bittersweet, in 1986, an essay on desire in Greek poetry that people still read far from any classroom.

The classroom never left her life, though. Carson started teaching classics in Calgary in 1979 and went on to Princeton, McGill in Montreal and the University of Michigan. Since 2009 she has taught in NYU's creative writing program in New York. For her, reading Greek and writing poems were always the same job.

The book that changed everything was Autobiography of Red, in 1998. She takes Geryon, the winged red monster Hercules kills in one of his twelve labors, and turns him into a shy boy who photographs the world. It is a novel told in verse, with a little essay up front. Men in the Off Hours and The Beauty of the Husband, a fictional essay in 29 tangos, came soon after. In 2001 she won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, the first woman to take the Eliot. In 2013 Red Doc> went back to the same character and earned her a second Griffin, which nobody had done before.

The Carson method is to mix things up. One book can hold a poem, a footnote, a script and a translation. She quotes Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Kafka and Virginia Woolf right next to Sappho and Simonides. She writes about desire, loss and grief, and has said she treats her own life as just one more set of facts. Nox, from 2010, is an elegy for her brother built as an accordion-fold notebook inside a box. Many projects are made with her husband, the artist Robert Currie.

As a translator she has put Sappho's fragments into English, in If Not, Winter (2002), along with ten tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Her Antigone reached the stage in 2015, directed by Ivo van Hove with Juliette Binoche in the title role, and toured Europe and the United States.

The honors kept coming: a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2020, the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2021. Wrong Norma, from 2024, made the National Book Award longlist. On October 8, 2026, the Swedish Academy named her the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.