Anne Carson at the 2024 National Book Awards. Credit: Jay Dixit/ Wikimedia Commons.

“Yikes.”

It is perhaps not the most poetic sentiment with which to receive the news that you have been honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, but Anne Carson has always been a bender of language and genre. The Nobel committee noted just that in its official announcement on Oct. 8, citing Carson’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” In an interview shortly after the announcement, committee member Steve Sem-Sandberg expanded on that description of the poet, essayist, professor and translator: “Nobody writes like her…. Nobody would dare to.”

Carson, a Canadian national who also holds Icelandic citizenship, was in her Reykjavík home when she first heard the news from her agent—hence the above unprepared “Yikes.” She was not considered the favorite, after all—that would be the Chinese writer Can Xue—but she had been mentioned as a contender by prominent betting sites (you can bet on anything now) along with the Australian Gerald Murnane, Haruki Murakami of Japan, the American Thomas Pynchon and Carson’s fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood. (The Canadian satirical online publication The Beaverton couldn’t resist the chance to publish “Furious Trump rails against Canadian Anne Carson winning Nobel Prize in Literature.”)

Carson was born in Toronto in 1950. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto in 1974 (taking a few breaks along the way) and went on to earn her doctorate in Classics from the university in 1981. Her teaching career began at the University of Calgary in 1979 but soon took her to Princeton University. Princeton ended up with some egg on its face a few days ago after it congratulated Carson on social media and noted she “taught at Princeton University in the 1980s,” failing to mention the school denied her tenure in 1987.

In the decades since, Carson has taught Classics, creative writing and more at institutions including Emory University, McGill, the University of Michigan, U.C. Berkeley, NYU, Cornell, Stanford, Bard and more, describing herself as a “visiting [whatever].” To this day, she uses as her author bio this simple sentence: “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.”

Her publishing career began with Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986), an adaptation of her doctoral thesis. It was later named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library. Alongside her more poetic and personal works have been many translations and interpretations of plays and other prominent works from Ancient Greek. Her style in many texts has been described as everything from “heretical poetry” to “verse essays” to “Classical pastiche,” blending her knowledge of the literature of the ancient world with a diversity of poetic forms and startling digressions into other parts of the Western literary canon—as well as some autobiographical reflection that the famously private author has usually been careful not to acknowledge.

Some of her many publications have included Glass, Irony and God (1992), Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995), Men in the Off Hours (2001) Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), Nox (2010), Red Doc> (a sequel to Autobiography of Red, 2013) and Float (2016). 

When The Beauty of The Husband won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2002, the judges praised her for “a work of radical beauty” of “an ingenious form that brings narrative force to bear on language so precise that its devastated lyricism guides readers straight into the heart of their own unguarded desires.” She also won the T. S. Eliot prize in 2001 for The Beauty of The Husband (the first woman to win it), and has been honored with Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.

America has not distinguished itself over the years in its coverage of Carson’s work: Other than a 1999 review of The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997 in which her name was misspelled, I could find only one other reference to her in our pages, in Nick Ripatrazone’s excellent 2018 profile of the peot Traci Brimhall, where Brimhall cited Carson’s Book of Isaiah as an example of writing on faith and doubt that moved her. Our friends at Commonweal have done better: In a 2025 essay, Anthony Domestico called Carson “the most renowned living writer of lyric essays in the English language,” and the year before, Jordan Burke reviewed her prose and poetry collection, Wrong Norma.

Though she was raised Catholic and a formative book in her childhood was an illustrated Lives of the Saints, Carson does not have much time for the institutional church, saying in a 2011 interview that “I can’t tolerate papal things in general.” (Even Homer nods.) Asked her idea of God, she told interviewer Eleanor Wachtel that “I don’t have an idea of it any more at all. Maybe I once did, at least an idea of unknowability as a divine atmosphere but I don’t even know that that’s solid in me any more.” (You can read Carson’s poem “My Religion” here.) In a 2004 interview in The Paris Review, she said, “I wouldn’t say the doctrinaire side of Catholicism, for example, makes much sense to me in its details or its history. So, no, I don’t look to Catholic thinking as a guide to how to live my life.”

“Like many people whose childhoods were partly shaped by the Catholic Church, Carson has a mystical yearning for spiritual fulfillment combined with a strong spirit of rebellion,” wrote the classicist Emily Wilson in a 2024 review of Wrong Norma in The Nation. “A literal, singular capital-G ‘God’ makes an occasional appearance in her writing, but her spirituality is more often expressed as a reverent fixation on Greek antiquity, combined with an eagerness to doodle in the margins or spray-paint across the delicate parchment of her own most beloved texts.”

Carson began living in Iceland for part of each year in 2008, and she and her husband Robert Currie were granted Icelandic citizenship in 2022. In 2024, she revealed in the London Review of Books that she has Parkinson’s disease. That essay began with an extended meditation on life and death:

So,​ your life. There it is before you—possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map—let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

Carson was asked during her official Nobel phone interview how she planned to celebrate. “We’re going to go out for a walk in the woods,” she said, “so that we don’t have to answer the phone. And then we’re going to hear the quiet.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is our “Fall Poetry Roundup,” with reviews of new works by poets famous and not from America’s staff. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.