Toronto-born poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Oct. 8, becoming the second Canadian woman to receive the award after short-story writer Alice Munro in 2013.
The Swedish Academy honoured the 76-year-old classicist “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” The prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor, about US$1.2 million, and will be presented in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Ingrid Carlberg, the academy’s permanent secretary, said Carson was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the academy reached her and was “very taken by surprise,” The Associated Press reported. The AP said it could not immediately reach Carson or her literary agent after the announcement.
Carson has published more than 20 books that move between poetry, essay, scholarship, translation and fiction, often within the same volume, according to the University of Toronto. Her 1986 debut, Eros the Bittersweet, examined desire in ancient Greek literature. Her best-known book, Autobiography of Red (1998), retells a Greek myth as a novel in verse.
Her collection Men in the Off Hours won the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001, and The Beauty of the Husband made her the first woman to win Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize, the university said. She later became the first two-time winner of the Griffin’s Canadian category, with Red Doc> in 2014.
Her translations include If Not, Winter (2002), a version of the poet Sappho that treats the gaps in the surviving fragments as part of the text, as well as plays by Sophocles and Euripides. Nox (2010) is an elegy for her brother Michael, and Wrong Norma (2024) gathers short pieces with her own illustrations, the AP said.
Carson is also the first University of Toronto alumna to win the prize. She studied at St. Michael’s College and earned three degrees from the university, finishing with a PhD in classics in 1981, and returned in 2020 as its Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory.
“This is a very proud moment for our global alumni community and for the entire university,” U of T President Melanie Woodin said in the university’s announcement.
Elizabeth Harvey, a professor emerita of English at the university, said the award “will open the door for a wide audience who will now feel emboldened to discover her work.”
Carson has taught classics at several universities in Canada and the United States. She now lives in Iceland, where she and her husband, Robert Currie, were granted citizenship in 2022, according to the AP. In 2024 she wrote publicly in the London Review of Books about being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Her earlier honours include MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, a Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005. The University of Toronto said she is the 19th woman among the 123 people who have won the literature prize.
She succeeds Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, who won in 2025. The literature award was the fourth of this year’s Nobel announcements. The Norwegian Nobel Committee named South African jurist Navi Pillay as the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate on Oct. 9, and the economics prize is due on Monday, Oct. 12.
Via The Associated Press (NBC News), CBC News and University of Toronto News.
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Sources: the Nobel Prize announcement, the University of Toronto and The Associated Press. Photo: Anne Carson at the 2024 National Book Awards in New York, by Jay Dixit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
