When she received the call from the Swedish Academy, Anne Carson says she was in Iceland, listening to the wind. This was the image with which the Nobel Prize for Literature 2026awarded to the 76-year-old Canadian poet, essayist and translator. A choice that recognizes one of the most original voices of contemporary literature, capable of crossing the boundaries between literary genres and artistic disciplines and of transforming the great myths of antiquity into surprisingly modern stories.
The motivation of the Swedish Academy rewards Anne Carson «for her bold and creative work which, in a playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature». A definition that summarizes over forty years of literary experimentation, during which the author has built a universe in which Sappho meets Virginia Woolf, the characters of Greek mythology navigate the anxieties of the present and poetry stops being just poetry to become a story, an essay, a theatrical performance and even an artistic object.
The news was communicated to the writer by Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, who during the press conference in Stockholm said that she had reached her by telephone shortly before the official announcement. Carson, who also holds Icelandic citizenship, appeared surprised but happy and commented on the recognition with the irony that also characterizes her writing: “I think they’re all crazy.” With an extra twist: when asked how the Nobel would change his publishing life, he replied that he would probably have a sticker on the cover of his books, adding that stickers help sales.
Who is Anne Carson, the Canadian writer who won the Nobel
Born in Toronto on June 21, 1950, Anne Carson built her literary identity around an early passion for the Greek language and culture. She was introduced to ancient Greek by a Latin teacher who, during her high school years, agreed to give her lessons during lunch breaks. That meeting would have a profound impact on her intellectual path, leading her to study Classics at the University of Toronto, where she also obtained her doctorate, and subsequently to teach in various North American universities.
Scholar and translator of Sappho, Euripides and Sophocles, Carson has never considered the classical world an immobile heritage, to be preserved only through academic interpretation. On the contrary, in his books ancient texts become living material, tools through which to question desire, loss, identity and the contradictions of human relationships. Translation itself, in his conception, is not simply the transfer of a text from one language to another, but a creative act that allows words to acquire new meanings.
His first book, Eros the Bittersweetpublished in 1986 and arrived in Italy with the title Eros the bittersweet for Utopia, it already contains many of the elements that would become distinctive of his work. Through the poetry of Sappho, Platonic philosophy and Greek literature, Carson analyzes desire as a contradictory experience, in which pleasure is inseparable from absence and love arises precisely from the distance between what one possesses and what one would like to achieve. A reflection that mixes literary criticism, philosophy and poetic sensitivity, showing from the beginning the difficulty of placing his writing within a traditional category.
From «Autobiography of red» to «Nox»: the books that changed contemporary poetry
The work that more than any other has contributed to his international success is Autobiography of the redoriginally published in 1998 and available in Italy through La Nave di Teseo. Defined as a novel in verse, it tells the story of Geryon, the red-skinned winged monster who in Greek mythology was killed by Heracles during one of his twelve labours. Carson recovers this figure from the fragments of the poet Stesicoro and transforms him into a fragile, shy and profoundly different teenager from the others, struggling with the discovery of sexuality, falling in love and the pain of an impossible relationship.
Heracles, from a hero destined to defeat the monster, becomes the boy with whom Geryon falls in love. The ancient mythological story is thus transformed into a Bildungsroman crossed by desire, inadequacy and the fear of abandonment. The result is a work in which the emotional strength of the narrative coexists with a complex poetic construction, capable of questioning both the conventions of the novel and those of poetry.
Another example of his research is The beauty of the husbandreleased in 2001 and published in Italy by La Tartaruga in 2022, an essay-novel divided into 29 tangos that tells the story of the failure of a marriage through writing capable of alternating irony, bitterness, sensuality and philosophical reflection. Here too, Carson addresses one of the central themes of his production, love as an experience that can transform into loss, using a literary structure that simultaneously recalls dance, theater and autobiographical storytelling.
With Noxpublished in 2010, the experimentation instead reaches a material dimension. The work was born from the death of his brother Michael and takes the form of a box containing a long book folded like an accordion, in which photographs, letters, fragments of memory and linguistic reflections are intertwined with the translation of a poem by Catullus dedicated to his deceased brother. Mourning thus becomes an investigation into the impossibility of knowing another person completely and into the ability, but also the limits, of literature to preserve what has been lost.
When Marilyn Monroe meets Helen of Troy
Perhaps no work shows Anne Carson’s originality as immediately as she does Norma Jeane Baker of Troypublished in 2019 and arrived in Italy with the title It was a cloudfor Crocetti. The play, originally conceived for the British actor Ben Whishaw, connects two apparently very distant figures: Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. The first belongs to the imagery of Greek mythology, the second to the history of cinema and popular culture of the twentieth century. Both have been transformed into universal symbols of beauty and desire, often deprived of the possibility of autonomously defining their own identity. Carson uses the version of the myth told by Euripides, according to which it was not the real Helen who arrived in Troy but an image of her, to reflect on the public construction of the female figure and the relationship between appearance, power and violence.
The result? A work that spans over two thousand years of cultural history to question mechanisms that are still current, from the transformation of women into objects of collective desire to the distance between personal identity and public representation.
Anne Carson’s books published in Italy
Despite the international prestige achieved already in the 1990s, the diffusion of Anne Carson’s work in Italy has been relatively slow, with several translations published many years after the original editions. In recent years, however, numerous publishing houses have contributed to making a significant part of his production accessible.
Next to Autobiography of the redpublished by La Nave di Teseo, ea The beauty of the husbandreleased by La Tartaruga, brought Utopia to Italian bookstores Economy of the lost, Eros the bittersweet, Decreation and, in 2025, The wrong standardtranslation of Wrong Normacollection of prose and experimental texts also accompanied by drawings by the author.
Crocetti instead published It was a cloud, Glass, irony and God And Like waterwhich arrived in bookstores in 2025. The latter, translation of Plainwaterbrings together essays and poems in a hybrid structure, offering a particularly representative example of Carson’s literary method, in which the observation of reality, philosophical reflection and comparison with the great works of the past can coexist on the same page.
Precisely on the day of the Nobel Prize, a piece of news arrives for Italian readers: The Ship of Theseus has announced the publication of by the end of November 2026 Red Doc>the sequel to Autobiography of the redin the translation by Patrizio Ceccagnoli. The book finds Geryon, now an adult, and continues the character’s journey through a new narrative in verse, in which the questions about love, belonging and the possibility of finding a place in the world return.
An international career and a Nobel that comes after Han Kang
The Nobel Prize represents the most prestigious recognition of a career already marked by numerous international awards. Carson has received two Griffin Poetry Prizes, in 2001 and 2014, the TS Eliot Prize and, in 2020, the Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature, as well as the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. In 2025 she was also awarded the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Prize.
With her victory, Anne Carson becomes the nineteenth woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature since its institution in 1901. The recognition also returns to a Canadian writer thirteen years after Alice Munro, awarded in 2013, and follows, among the most recent winners, the South Korean Han Kang, who won the Nobel in 2024.
A fact that also takes on a particular meaning for Italy, precisely in the year in which the centenary of the Nobel awarded to Grazia Deledda in 1926 occurs, still today the only Italian writer to have received the prize.
The choice of Anne Carson also confirms the Swedish Academy’s attention to authors capable of questioning consolidated forms of narration and to a literature that does not consider tradition a limit, but a possibility for innovation. In the case of the Canadian writer, this path passes above all through language, its meanings and the infinite possibilities offered by the encounter between different genres.
