This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Anne Carson — “for her bold and inventive body of work, which in playful dialogue with the classical tradition has created new forms for contemporary literature”, the prize’s website says.
Throughout her career, the Canadian writer Anne Carson has combined writing poetry with translation work and teaching at various universities. Almost all of her literary output is focused on the intersection of a philological obsession with words and a poetic drive towards new meanings.
“She herself described the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work,” the Nobel Committee noted.
Carson was born in Toronto in 1950. In 1981, she published her doctoral dissertation in classical philology entitled “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum”.
In her essay “Eros the Bittersweet” (“Eros the Bittersweet”, 1986), Carson laid the foundations for her later work.
In the essay “Economy of the Unlost” (“Economy of the Unlost”, 1999), Carson compares the sixth-century BC Greek poet Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan, and in “Men in the Off Hours” (“Men in the Off Hours”, 2000) places the historian Thucydides alongside Virginia Woolf. It was through such, often unexpected, literary constellations that Carson moved away from lyric poetry tied to a narrative “I” and inspired new forms of contemporary literature. This method of writing produces playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry, but also between different genres and art forms.