The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature is Canada’s Anne Carson, an essayist and classicist who brings a modern twist to mysticism and antiquity in her writings about love, desire and despair.
The 76-year-old won “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.
Carson is widely known for her translations of classical Greek literature, which heavily influences her work which ranges from opera librettos to literary criticism and verse novels such as Autobiography of Red from 1998.
Her style is exemplified in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy from 2019, a performance piece which mixes the stories of Helen of Troy in Euripides’ play Helen and Marilyn Monroe.