Canadian poet, essayist and classicist Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday. The academy praised her “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.

Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950. She is a poet, essayist, translator and scholar of classical literature whose work frequently crosses the boundaries between poetry, prose, essays, literary criticism and translation.

The Poetry Foundation describes her publishing career as difficult to classify, noting her work across verse novels, libretti, prose criticism and translations of classical writers, including Sappho and Euripides.

Carson’s academic grounding in classical languages and literature has remained central to her writing, informing works that revisit ancient texts and ideas through unconventional literary forms.

According to the Academy of American Poets, her interest in ancient Greek literature began in high school, when a Latin teacher helped her learn ancient Greek during lunch breaks. She studied at the University of Toronto’s St Michael’s College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1974, a master’s degree in 1975 and a PhD in Classics in 1981. She also studied Greek metrics for a year at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Carson’s first book Eros the Bittersweet (1986) combined classical Greek literature with literary criticism. It explored the relationship between desire and the literary tradition and helped establish her reputation as a writer who brings scholarly inquiry to creative writing, according to the Poetry Foundation.

Her best-known books include Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), which reimagines an ancient Greek myth through the story of Geryon, a red-winged figure, and his relationship with Herakles. Rather than retelling the myth conventionally, Carson recasts it in a modern setting, combining classical material with contemporary themes of love, vulnerability and heartbreak.

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) examines desire and marital breakdown through a hybrid form that blends poetry and the essay. It won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, according to the Academy of American Poets.

Carson has also translated ancient Greek works, including Sappho’s fragments in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), and produced An Oresteia (2009), a collection bringing together plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

The Nobel Prize adds to a career that has received recognition across poetry and literary scholarship. The Academy of American Poets lists the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship among her honours.

Carson has taught at universities in Canada and the United States, including McGill University, Princeton University, Emory University and the University of Michigan, according to the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation.

Her writing has drawn attention for treating academic knowledge not simply as background but as part of the creative process. By drawing on ancient literature while experimenting with form, voice and genre, Carson has developed a body of work that challenges conventional distinctions between poetry, scholarship and storytelling.

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature recognises that distinctive contribution: a writer whose engagement with the classical tradition has helped create new possibilities for contemporary literature.

— The Economic Times