The Authors Guild congratulates Anne Carson, recipient of the acclaimed 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. In announcing the award, Carson was lauded “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

Carson, 76, a noted poet, essayist, translator, and classical scholar, has been a professor of classics for over 30 years and has written over 20 books. The Canadian-born author is the recipient of numerous awards including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Her original and often unexpected work breaks from lyrical poetry and has been praised for mixing classical antiquity with modern life and fusing poetry with prose. Nobel award committee chair Anders Olsson described Carson’s juxtaposition of classical and modern writers as central to her creation of new literary forms, citing her pairing of Simonides with Paul Celan in Economy of the Unlost and of Thucydides with Virginia Woolf in Men in the Off Hours. Noted for her poetry as well as her translations, she has identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work.

Her influential work moves between classical and modern poetry, and also between different genres and artforms, while her translations from Classical Greek are regarded as independent works themselves.

Carson received the “unexpected” news of her Nobel Prize while quietly sipping tea at home in Iceland and responded by stating “It’s a little insane,” revealing that she’s “thinking of ways to give the money away” and plans to donate a portion of the prize money to charitable causes.

Carson, who describes her work as “inadvertent,” shares her only writing rule: “Start in the middle.” When asked where to begin in discovering her work, she suggests starting with her most well-known work, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), which she described as her most accessible. As for her inspiration, Carson tells the Awards committee, “Homer.”