{"id":175532,"date":"2026-10-08T15:18:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T19:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=175532"},"modified":"2026-10-08T15:18:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T19:18:27","slug":"anne-carson-nobel-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/08\/anne-carson-nobel-prize\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Carson Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Anne<\/a>

Photograph by Peter Smith. Courtesy of New Directions Books.<\/p><\/div>\n

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 \u201cfor her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the fall of 2004, the Review<\/em> published an Art of Poetry<\/a> 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, \u201creluctant to call herself a poet.\u201d In their conversation\u2014which spans Carson\u2019s relationship with God (or lack thereof), her life (in Aitken\u2019s words) \u201cas a gay man,\u201d and the boxing class Carson was taking at the time\u2014Carson reveals her motivations for writing: \u201cI write to find out what I think about something.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and battered.<\/span><\/p>\n

CARSON<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s an historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage, and I admire that\u2014the layers of time you have when looking at sheets of papyrus that were produced in the third century B.C.<\/small> 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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 2025, the <\/span>Review <\/span><\/i>awarded Carson the Hadada<\/a>, our award for lifetime achievement. Over the years, the <\/span>Review <\/span><\/i>has also published six poems<\/a> of Carson\u2019s, one piece of \u201cnarrative art,\u201d a piece of short fiction<\/a>, and a radio play<\/a>, which the <\/span>Review <\/span><\/i>released last year as the second episode<\/a> in our podcast series Inside the Issue<\/a>. This week, to celebrate her achievement, we\u2019ve unlocked all of Carson\u2019s work from our archive.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, we\u2019ve unlocked all of Carson\u2019s work from our archive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[68847,67827,2476,1394,9985,12509],"class_list":["post-175532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-bookmarks","tag-featured","tag-jorge-luis-borges","tag-mcnally-jackson","tag-nyrb","tag-patricia-lockwood"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnne Carson Wins the Nobel Prize<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. 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