Swedish Academy permanent secretary Ingrid Carlberg said the committee got through to Anne Carson, who had time only to tell her she was in Iceland listening to the wind. The 76-year-old Canadian poet, classicist and translator won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Oct. 8, cited for an oeuvre that, “in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
She’d spent the morning at her house in Reykjavik eating crackers, drinking tea and sweeping the floor. Then the phone kept ringing, and she kept turning it off.
“I just always turn off the phone when it rings,” she told the Nobel Foundation. It was her husband, the artist Robert Currie, who persuaded her to call the committee back.
Her reaction when she did: “Just seems a little insane. I think you’re all insane.” On hearing the news, Carson’s very first word was “Yikes,” according to her agent, Nicole Aragi.
The prize is worth about $1.2 million, and Carson said she and Currie are already thinking of ways to give it away, including to a friend who needs a house. On what it might do for her work, she kept it small: “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book. Stickers help.”
Following Saul Bellow and Alice Munro, Carson becomes the third Canadian-born laureate in literature. No author photo appears in her books, just the line: “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.”
