Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised her “bold and inventive” body of work, which, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.
Carson learned of the prize in Reykjavík, Iceland, while sweeping her kitchen. She is the second Canadian woman to win the literature Nobel, after Alice Munro, and the 19th woman among 123 laureates. She studied Greek and Latin at the University of Toronto, where she earned her bachelor’s, master’s and PhD.
The author of more than 20 books of poetry, essays, translation and fiction, including Autobiography of Red, she had already won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize and Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award. To celebrate, she said she would go for a walk in the woods without her phone, to “hear the quiet”.
