Canadian poet Anne Carson wins 2026 Nobel prize in literature
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And we have a winner! It’s the Canadian poet Anne Carson.
Key events
That’s it for another year! Thank you for joining us on the live blog. You can read the full story by Emma Loffhagen here:
The Nobel peace prize will be announced at 11am CEST on Friday (10am UK time).
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From the archive
Revisit Emma Brockes’ interview with Carson for the Guardian almost 20 years ago:
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Among Carson’s famous fans is singer and actor Olly Alexander. On her verse novel Autobiography of Red, he said:
I read it when I was a teenager and it totally changed my life. I was struggling with my sexuality. I didn’t come out to my friends and family until I was 19. The years preceding that I was trying to find ways to understand my sexuality and identity so I would look for gay writers and storylines. This really helped me understand myself.
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Carlberg said Carson was “very taken by surprise” when she told her the news over the phone just before the announcement.
Nobel Committee chair Anders Olsson told a press conference that Carson has “broken away from lyrical poetry bound to the narrative self and inspired new forms of contemporary literature. This method of writing leads to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and artforms.”
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The British poet Ruth Padel wrote about her admiration for Anne Carson in 2011 for the Guardian:
I first admired the Canadian poet Anne Carson as a Greek scholar, when I, too, was earning my living in that trade. I found in her poetry the same inspiring passion for words and ideas. In 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, I wrote about a poem of hers in which a daughter breakfasts with an irritating mother before visiting her father, an Alzheimer’s patient. You wouldn’t think anyone could make a poignant lyric out of that: she does.
Her Autobiography of Red blew my mind: I realised you can do absolutely anything with poetry if you follow your imagination truthfully enough. She turns the myth of Heracles conquering Geryon, a winged red monster, into a love story. Like Emily Dickinson, Carson doesn’t use fancy language: her matter-of-fact tone, and her quest to use words which communicate human experience as intensely as possible, aches with understanding. Part of her originality is that she doesn’t try to be original; she just wouldn’t find it interesting to make anything that wasn’t totally new.
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The Swedish Academy selected Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
Who is Anne Carson?
The Canadian poet, classicist and translator is best known for genre-crossing works such as Autobiography of Red, a queer coming-of-age story which reimagines a poem by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus.
Born in 1950 in Toronto, Carson earned a PhD in classics and has taught at a number of universities throughout her decades-long career.
Her works include Plainwater, Wrong Norma and The Beauty of the Husband. She became the first woman to ever win the TS Eliot prize with the latter in 2001.
Canadian poet Anne Carson wins 2026 Nobel prize in literature
Ella Creamer
And we have a winner! It’s the Canadian poet Anne Carson.
Ella Creamer
Ingrid Carlberg, the new permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, has begun her speech. In just a few moments we’ll find out this year’s winner …
Ella Creamer
Nobel snubs
A number of major 20th century writers never received a Nobel in their lifetimes. Here are some of the biggies who missed out:
The Argentine master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges, was put forward 38 times between 1965 and 1975, the latest year for which you can view the nomination archive (each year’s record only becomes publicly available 50 years later).
The two great modernists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, were never nominated.
Leo Tolstoy was nominated 16 times for the prize in literature and three times for the Peace prize between when the ceremonies began in 1901 and his death in 1910.
Vladimir Nabokov was nominated to no avail 27 times between 1963 and 1975, including by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
WH Auden was put forward fruitlessly 41 times.
Graham Greene received 43 nominations between 1950 and 1975, and never won.
You can browse the nomination database for each year here, and search by person here.
