Five Questions about Nobel Laureate Anne Carson

In October, internationally celebrated poet, writer, translator, and classical scholar Anne Carson won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carson has deep roots in LSA. After a year in academic residence at LSA’s Institute for the Humanities in 1999, Carson taught as a professor jointly appointed across three LSA departments: Classics, Comparative Literature, and English, between 2003 and 2009. While she currently divides her time between homes in Iceland and Ann Arbor, Carson has maintained a strong presence in the college since moving on from her LSA faculty role, staging her translations of Greek plays like Antigonick on campus and Antigone at the University Musical Society, giving poetry readings, and serving as an honored member of the LSA community. 

In addition to her recent Nobel, Carson has been recognized with awards that include those from the Guggenheim Foundation (1998), the MacArthur Foundation (2000), and the PEN Foundation (2021). She’s the author of translations of 10 ancient Greek tragedies, 18 books of poetry and prose, and of many mixed-media performances and installations. And for decades, Carson’s creative output has conversed with popular culture; no one else could write about attending a Rosalía concert the way that she did for the London Review of Books in 2026, and back in 2004, her books Eros the Bittersweet and Autobiography of Red even earned a rapturous shoutout in episode one of The L Word. For someone so widely adored and lauded, Carson is a private and humble figure. 

When LSA reached Carson via email for comment on the honor, we received the following concise statement from the Nobel Laureate: “Yikes.” (According to her agent, Nicole Aragi, the poet uttered the same to her after learning she’d been awarded the prize.) 

Yopie Prins, the Irene H. Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at LSA, has known Carson for more than 40 years. Prins was Carson’s graduate student at Princeton University, and her colleague during the years that Carson taught in LSA , and she currently teaches Carson’s work to the next generation of students at U-M. 

On the morning that the Nobel was announced, the Associated Press visited Prins at her home to talk about Carson, as a scholar and as a person. Prins said in that AP interview, “From the first time I studied with her, I knew she had so much to offer as a scholar and as a human being. She has so much wit and wisdom in her work, and the way that she reads poetry, the way that she translates, the way that she writes poetry, has always been a deep inspiration to me, and it has shaped my career and my life.”

LSA talked with Prins about how Carson shaped her career and her life, and how the Nobel Laureate inspires her to read, think, and teach differently.

LSA: You studied classical Greek literature under Anne Carson during your Ph.D. program at Princeton University. How has the experience of being Carson’s student influenced your work as a teacher?

Yopie Prins: I took a class on ancient Greek lyric with Anne where we read the fragments of Sappho, and that was a formative experience for me—learning to stay with the text and pay close attention, to see not only what but also how we read. There’s an openness to this practice of reading, an unusual kind of receptivity, that I really came to value as Anne’s creative pedagogy. Today, whenever I go into the classroom to teach a poem, I never really know what’s going to happen. Each time I wonder, What’s going to come out of the conversation? I do my best to stay open to what and how the students are seeing, and from there, a reading emerges that is never the same from class to class.

Anne also impressed me as an imaginative, collaborative teacher. When she first came to the University of Michigan through the Institute for the Humanities, she taught a wonderful course on “decreation” that eventually became the subject of her book, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. She collaborated with her students to produce an “opera installation libretto” that she had written, entitled The Mirror of Simple Souls. It wasn’t a traditional opera performance, but an interactive installation at the Duderstadt Center, where we encountered the libretto by walking through different spaces designed and built by students in the class. So the process of reading this text became an experience to move through and reflect on.

Anne likes to describe her writing as “inadvertent,” on the way to something else, and I try to incorporate that concept into my work as well. I think of my pedagogy as being a translational process where the students and I are translating each other, we’re translating the text, and we’re engaging in a creative process, too, finding meaning. It’s not random; it’s actually very much determined by the people, the classroom space, the historical moment, but at the same time, it’s radically open, too—that is what I have learned from Anne, both as a student and now as a teacher.

LSA: And what does Carson’s work mean to you as a scholar of Greek literature and as a translator?

YP: My first scholarly book was Victorian Sappho, inspired by the idea of Sappho as an ongoing historical process of translating over the centuries; what we read as “Sappho” today is both cause and effect of translation. More recently, I have been working on a series of lectures about Sappho as an echoing figure in 20th century music and sound studies. One of my lectures is called “Bracket,” reflecting on what Anne does with the bracket to mark gaps in her translations of the Sapphic fragments, and tracing how other artists, scholars, and critics have taken up this idea of lyric bracketing.

LSA: LSA’s renowned literary journal, the Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR), published Carson’s poem “Shot List” in 2006, in an issue centered on the theme of “The Documentary Imagination.” The poem is written in the form of an actual shot list—something a filmmaker would use before filming. Could you comment on Carson’s use of inventive forms, in this poem and in other works?

YP: Anne is a very visual thinker and here she seems to be thinking both cinematically and photographically. She likes to invent poetic forms that combine visual and verbal elements, and in fact this poem was made into a window installation near campus for National Poetry Month in 2023. Her poems move across multiple genres and media, and often her poetry readings are accompanied with slides or videos, or collaborations with other artists and performers. When she presents a lecture, it can be partially a translation, partially a reading of a painting, partially a dance performance, and sometimes there’s an invitation for the audience to participate as well at the end, by joining in a 10-second scream. Through these poetic experiments, Anne is continually de-creating and re-creating the idea of making “literature.”

LSA: An excerpt of Carson’s translation of Euripides’s “First Choral Ode of Bakkhai” was also originally published in MQR, in a 2013 issue on translation. How do you understand the significance of this translation, and of Carson’s contributions to the field of Greek translation?

YP: I love how this choral ode has been translated and transformed into Anne’s own visual choreography in English. She has translated a good number of Greek tragedies over the years, some of which are more like poetic performances on the page (in artbooks like Antigonick, or in H of H Playbook, about the Greek tragedy Herakles), while others are intended for performance on the stage (Ben Whishaw brilliantly performed the role of Dionysus in her Bakkhai translation). Anne also transforms the way we read Greek tragedy by adding new layers to the translation process. For example, her translator’s preface to Sophocles’s Electra is called “Screaming in Translation,” and at the end of Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, she includes a dramatic monologue where she writes as Euripides addressing his audience. She is both a classical scholar who is deeply immersed in ancient texts, and a creative translator who likes to inhabit the intermediate space between ancient and modern languages to imagine new possibilities for writing poetry. Translation means many different things to Carson—it can mean transcription, transposition, transformation, transgression, transmediation. I think that’s one of the things that’s really powerful and liberating about her work.

LSA: Recently, The New York Times called Carson “the easiest difficult poet,” and “too hilarious to be intimidating.” But at the same time, her work is not simple—she’s invested in ancient Greek, innovative forms, and is always “crossing genres,” as you said. Where would you tell someone to begin with Carson’s work if they’ve never read her before?

YP: That’s a good question. I know a lot of people find Autobiography of Red [a 1998 novel-in-verse that reimagines the Greek myth of Geryon as told by a queer teenage boy] the most accessible of her books because it reads more like a novel. Her translation of Sappho in If Not, Winter has also been very popular, to the point that many readers (at least in our time) consider this to be “the real Sappho.” Her book Nox was originally a private notebook that Anne made as an elegy for her brother, including some of his photographs and letters as well as her translation, word by word, of a Latin poem by Catullus. She circulated this as a mourning object first with friends, and later it was published in facsimile as a book in a box, with pages that open like an accordion. It’s not an easy book to read, both intimate and scholarly, and yet a lot of people have connected with it over the years.

Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, really established her as a unique and distinct voice, not only in classical scholarship, but elsewhere. And, you know, there are so many popular culture references to Eros the Bittersweet, even in The L Word. I think the book’s a very good introduction to how Anne Carson thinks as a scholar and as a poet at the same time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Top photograph by Don J. Usner. Second photo courtesy of Yopie Prins