Anne Carson, an acclaimed poet, essayist, translator and classicist, has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carson held the Norman Freehling Visiting Professorship at the University of Michigan in 1999–2000. She returned in 2003 as a professor of Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, and English Language and Literature, serving on the faculty until 2009.
For more than four decades, Carson has challenged conventional boundaries among poetry, scholarship, translation and performance. Drawing frequently on ancient Greek literature, she brings classical texts into conversation with enduring questions of desire, grief, memory, distance and loss.
Carson’s influential works include Eros the Bittersweet, Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, Nox and Float. Her formally inventive writing has shaped generations of writers and scholars, demonstrating how rigorous thought and creative expression can enrich one another.
The Nobel Prize recognizes Carson’s extraordinary contributions to contemporary literature and celebrates a body of work that has expanded what poetry, criticism and translation can accomplish.
