Photograph by Peter Smith. Courtesy of New Directions Books.

The Nobel Prize committee announced this morning that the Canadian poet, essayist, classicist, and translator Anne Carson has won the 2026 award in literature, praising her “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

In the fall of 2004, the Review published an Art of Poetry interview with Carson, who was then teaching classics at the University of Michigan, and, as her interviewer, Will Aitken, writes in his introduction to the interview, “reluctant to call herself a poet.” In their conversation—which spans Carson’s relationship with God (or lack thereof), her life (in Aitken’s words) “as a gay man,” and the boxing class Carson was taking at the time—Carson reveals her motivations for writing: “I write to find out what I think about something.”

INTERVIEWER

I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and battered.

CARSON

In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s an historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage, and I admire that—the layers of time you have when looking at sheets of papyrus that were produced in the third century B.C. and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.

In 2025, the Review awarded Carson the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement. Over the years, the Review has also published six poems of Carson’s, one piece of “narrative art,” a piece of short fiction, and a radio play, which the Review released last year as the second episode in our podcast series Inside the Issue. This week, to celebrate her achievement, we’ve unlocked all of Carson’s work from our archive.