Anne Carson, a classics professor who has taught at many institutions throughout Canada and the United States, is the 119th recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Carson is the 19th woman to receive the prestigious award.
According to the award citation, the honor recognizes Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
Born in Toronto, Carson earned her bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and Ph.D. in classics, all from the University of Toronto. Throughout her lifetime, she has held teaching appointments with numerous universities, including Princeton University, Emory University in Atlanta, McGill University in Montreal, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University, and New York University.
Carson is known for her work in poetry, fiction, and translation. She has won several prestigious literary awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, among others. She is also the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships. Carson’s many publications include the verse novel Autobiography of Red (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) and its follow-up Red Doc> (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), the essay Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton University Press, 1986), and the recent poetry collection Wrong Norma (New Directions, 2024), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2025.