She was lauded for her “bold and inventive oeuvre,” which includes translations of ancient Greek texts, repurposed in a modern voice.

The Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

She is the third Canadian-born writer to have won the prize, after Alice Munro in 2013 and Saul Bellow in 1976.

Carson, 76, is best known for her translations of ancient Greek texts and for repurposing those in a modern voice. “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse,” from 1998, turned a fragment of Greek poetry into a tale of a moody teenager’s destructive love affair, and “Red Doc >,” from 2013, a sequel of sorts to “Autobiography of Red,” concerned a road trip.

“Many toil in the interstices of genre,” Daisy Fried wrote in a 2013 review of “Red Doc >” for The New York Times. “Carson’s palatable, popular, sophisticated and who-cares approach may have done the most and best work in the last two decades to stop people worrying so much about what’s poetry and what’s not.”

Sam Anderson, in a 2013 profile of Carson for The New York Times Magazine, said that the author’s work “can seduce even people who don’t like poetry. ”

The Nobel Prize, literature’s key honor, is typically the capstone to a writer’s career. Past recipients have included the poets W.B. Yeats and Louise Glück, the playwrights Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, and the novelists Han Kang and Toni Morrison. More unexpected recipients have included Bob Dylan, in 2016, and Winston Churchill, in 1953.

The new laureate receives 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million, as well as a huge boost in reputation.

In recent years, the Swedish Academy, the body that organizes the prize, has tried to expand the diversity of laureates after criticism that too many past recipients have been men. Since 2018, the academy has alternated between male and female laureates. Given that last year’s prize went to the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, critics had expected this year’s accolade to go to a female laureate.

And before Thursday’s announcement, bookmakers had two favorites for the prize: Carson and Can Xue, the avant-garde Chinese writer.

Carson, who was born in Toronto in 1950, first became interested in ancient Greek texts in high school. She later studied at the University of Toronto, and became a classics teacher at the University of Calgary before her writing career took off.

Among Carson’s other key works is “Wrong Norma,” a poetry collection that earned her a National Book Award nomination in 2024. The poems ranged through subjects including her father, snow and Roget’s Thesaurus, but there was no link between them, Carson said: “That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”

Tristram Fane Saunders, reviewing “Wrong Norma” for The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, said the poems were “united only by the fact they’re all somehow uncompromisingly intelligent while being effortlessly readable.”

Carson has rarely discussed her private life in interviews, but in an August 2024 essay in The London Review of Books she said that she had Parkinson’s disease and that her handwriting had “disintegrated” as a result.

“I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year,” Carson wrote: “Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.”

She added that she had joined a boxing class to help with the disease’s symptoms.

On Thursday, Ingrid Carlberg, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said in a news conference announcing the award that she had just spoken with Carson on the telephone. Carson sounded “very taken by surprise,” Carlberg said.

It was a short call, Carlberg added: All the poet would say was she was “in Iceland,” where she was “listening to the wind.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5910736&forum_id=2#50177917)