Anne Carson (b. 1950)

Anne Carson was born in Toronto in 1950 and trained as a classicist. Her doctoral thesis, from 1981, is called Odi et Amo Ergo Sum: I hate and I love, therefore I am. She has taught at universities ever since, and she has written poems the whole time. She does not treat these as two jobs.

She has said herself that the etymology of words is where all her work begins. A word is opened the way a lock is opened, and what is inside is usually older and stranger than the word on the door.

Much of what survives from the ancient world survives in pieces. A lacuna is the gap where the rest should be. Carson writes into the gap. In Autobiography of Red (1998) she starts from a few fragments by a Greek poet of the sixth century BC, about a red, winged monster named Geryon who is killed by Heracles. She keeps the monster and makes him a boy who falls in love. In Nox (2010) she mourns her brother Michael, who died abroad in 2000, in a box that unfolds like an accordion, with a Roman poet's elegy for his own dead brother inside it.

She received the Nobel Prize in 2026.

Her Nobel Lecture is given in December, after this page was written. Look for it, and for the Academy's presentation of her work, at NobelPrize.org.