Anne Carson

Anne Carson (born June 21, 1950, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and classicist whose work treats classical subjects in what has been called a postmodern fashion. Carson’s genre-averse approach to writing mixes poetry with essay, literary criticism, and other forms of prose, and her style is at once quirky, inventive, and erudite. In 2026 Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was cited by the Nobel Committee “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

Background and education

The daughter of a banker and a housewife (Robert and Margaret Carson), Carson grew up in a number of small Canadian towns. She was inspired by a high-school Latin teacher to study Greek, and, after a few diversions, received bachelor’s (1974), master’s (1975), and doctoral (1981) degrees in classics from the University of Toronto. She also attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she studied Greek metrical structures, and she received a diploma in classics there in 1976. She taught at a number of schools in Canada and the United States, including Princeton University, New Jersey; Emory University, Atlanta; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and McGill University, Montreal. She received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2000.

Poetry

Part translation, part literary history, and part philosophy, Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986; reissued 1998), is an examination of the nature of desire in ancient Greek literature. It grew out of her doctoral dissertation titled Odi et Amo Ergo Sum (“I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am”) and takes its cue from the Greek poet Sappho’s word for love and desire, glukupikron, often rendered as “sweetbitter.” Carson argues that desire is anchored in absence: People yearn for what they cannot fully possess, and desire persists precisely because its object remains wholly or partly unattainable. Carson illustrates this paradox through Sappho’s fragment 105a, which describes a sweet apple hanging high on a tree. The speaker initially suggests that the apple pickers have forgotten it and then corrects this impression: The apple pickers cannot reach it. For Carson, this amendment captures the nature of desire, which persists because it remains unattainable. She writes:

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Famous Poets and Poetic Form

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.

Carson tracks her understanding of eros to Plato’s Symposium, where the personified Eros is the child of Wealth (or Plenty) and Poverty, embodying a desire shaped by what is lacking. The book also explores the connections between longing, imagination, reading, and writing.

Eros, with its emphasis on desire and longing, is one of several Greek concepts of love.

The short essays (or prose poems) on several topics that constitute Short Talks (1992) were incorporated into Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995), a volume with water as its central metaphor. Glass, Irony, and God (1995) contains a quiet but wildly expressive poem, “The Glass Essay,” in which the narrator, while visiting her mother, meditates on a relationship gone bad, on English novelist and poet Emily Brontë (whom she is reading), and on a variety of other interrelated topics.

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In Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), inspired by the work of the 7th- and 6th-century-bce Greek poet Stesichorus (Stesichoros), Carson transforms the ancient Greek myth of Heracles (Hercules) and Geryon—in mythology, a triple-bodied, red-winged monster the theft of whose cattle is a canonical Labor of Heracles—into a modern story of unrequited love. The work had a surprisingly broad audience for a book of its nature. Carson also penned a sequel, Red Doc> (2013), in which Heracles and Geryon—renamed Sad and G, respectively—wander a series of mythologically inflected landscapes. It received the Griffin Poetry Prize. In another unexpected juxtaposition, she made a solid connection between Simonides of Ceos, a 6th–5th-century-bce Greek poet, and the 20th-century Romanian-born German-language poet Paul Celan in Economy of the Unlost (1999).

Time is the essential subject of Men in the Off Hours (2000; Griffin Poetry Prize), and poet John Keats’s treatment of the subject of beauty is the takeoff point for a further examination of beauty, desire, and marriage in The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001). For the work, Carson became the first woman to win the T.S. Eliot Prize. Decreation (2005), composed of poetry, essays, and opera, reflects on jealousy. The middle section of the opera libretto, called “Her Mirror of Simple Souls”—an appreciation of the work of the martyred 13th-century mystic Marguerite Porete—was produced in 1999 as an “opera installation.” Carson’s work Nox (2010; “Night”) is a sort of art book—containing reflections on the life and death of her elder brother, Michael Carson. Float, a volume of poetry and essays, was published in 2016.

Carson published Wrong Norma in 2024, a collection of prose poems about a broad range of subjects, from the British writer Joseph Conrad to snow to Carson’s father. As Carson declared, “The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’” The collection was shortlisted for a National Book Award for poetry.

Translations and other works

Carson’s translations of ancient works, some of which have drawn fire from more literal-minded classicists, include Sophocles’ Electra (2001) and Antigonick (2012; a retelling of Antigone) and Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006).

Carson returned to Sappho in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), a bilingual edition presenting Sappho’s surviving poetry. The volume prints, in English with the Greek alongside, every Sappho fragment compiled in Eva-Maria Voigt’s Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta (1971) that contains at least one legible word, occasionally adopting variants or conjectures from Voigt’s apparatus. Carson sought to convey Sappho’s words in direct language, retaining their original sequence wherever possible. While some of Sappho’s work survived in passages quoted by later ancient authors, other poems have been rediscovered on damaged papyri. Rather than attempting to complete these poems, Carson uses square brackets and blank space to suggest what is missing from the papyrus fragments; a single square bracket marks damaged or missing papyrus, whereas lines preserved only through quotation by later writers carry none. The gaps are, for Carson, where much of the reader’s imagination can get to work. In a 2004 interview with The Paris Review, she described the point at which a Sappho poem breaks off as “the magic of fragments” and added that “the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you” can be more compelling than any fully developed interpretation.

An Oresteia (2009) contains translations of plays by Aeschylus and others. Euripides’ plays also inspired several other works, including Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019; Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry in 2020), in which Carson re-envisioned Helen, with Marilyn Monroe in the title role. The work was first staged in 2019. Carson also collaborated with illustrator Rosanna Bruno on the comic book The Trojan Women (2021), an irreverent take on Euripides’ classic play.

In 2021 Carson received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

Writing with Parkinson disease

Carson publicly discussed her diagnosis of Parkinson disease in “Gloves on!” (2024), an essay published in the London Review of Books. She described how tremors had altered her handwriting and made some everyday movements require deliberate concentration, particularly affecting her long-standing practice of writing in notebooks. Carson also recounted attending boxing classes for people with Parkinson disease and the concentration needed to perform movements that had once come naturally. Despite the difficulties she described, she wrote the essay by hand.

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