Warmest congratulations to Anne Carson, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2026 ‘for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature’.
A boundary-breaking and creative writer and thinker, Anne Carson’s other awards and honours include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award. She has been shortlisted four times for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was the winner in 2000 with The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Cape Poetry), the first woman to win the Prize. She wrote amusingly about her win for the T. S. Eliot Prize 30th anniversary celebrations.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually by The Swedish Academy to an author who has, in the words of Alfred Nobel, ‘in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction’. Recipients include T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Pablo Neruda, Czesław Miłosz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Louise Glück.
