STOCKHOLM — Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Swedish Academy announced the award Thursday, recognizing Carson's inventive body of work and the way it carries classical literature into contemporary forms. The prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor, or roughly US$1.2 million.

A career that crosses literary forms

Carson's writing frequently moves among poetry, prose, criticism, dialogue and translation. Her books include Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, Red Doc> and Float, while her scholarship and translations draw extensively on ancient Greek literature.

She was in Iceland when she learned she had won, according to the academy. Carson, 76, was born in Toronto and has held Icelandic citizenship since 2022.

Deep Canadian academic roots

Carson earned three degrees from the University of Toronto: a bachelor's degree in 1974, a master's in 1975 and a PhD in classics in 1981. She later taught at the university as Northrop Frye Professor of Canadian Literature and received an honorary degree in 2012.

Her earlier honours include the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize for Men in the Off Hours in 2001 and an appointment to the Order of Canada. She was also the first woman to win Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize.

Thursday's announcement makes Carson the latest Canadian writer to receive the Nobel literature prize and places international attention on a career defined by experimentation with genre, translation and the classical tradition.

Sources: Reuters, October 8; The Associated Press, October 8; University of Toronto, October 8.

Lead image: Anne Carson at the 2024 National Book Awards finalist reading, photographed by Jay Dixit for WikiPortraits via Wikimedia Commons, cropped, CC BY-SA 4.0; file photograph, not the Nobel announcement.