LAST UPDATE | 4 hrs ago

CANADIAN POET AND essayist Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The author was awarded the prestigious prize by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm this afternoon.

The award carries a sum of 12 million Swedish kroner (€1.07 million).

The 76-year-old was honoured “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” the Swedish Academy said.

“They’re all crazy,” Carson said of Academy members’ decision to honour her, in an interview with public broadcaster RUV in Iceland where she has lived part of the year since 2008 and has become a citizen.

Asked by RUV on a blustery roadside if she thought the Nobel would change her readership, Carson, holding tightly to her cap so it wouldn’t blow away replied: “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my books.”

Carson said that poetry was perhaps well-suited to today’s fast-paced society.

“I think it’s probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster and everybody’s in a hurry.”

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Ingrid Carlberg, said she had briefly spoken to Carson.

“We didn’t have so much time to speak. All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind.

“She was taken by surprise, but very happy. I could hear that in her voice.”

The Academy said almost all her literary production “has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning”.

It singled out her poem “Nox,” printed on one continuous sheet of paper in homage to her dead brother, as “an unforgettable work”.

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said Carson’s win was “an extraordinary achievement and a proud moment for Canada”.

“She has brought ancient stories to new audiences and transformed the way we think about literature.”

Carson has been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate for years.

She was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over 30 years, according to publisher Penguin.

Her awards and honours include the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2020.

Carson suffers from Parkinson’s disease and wrote about it in the London Review of Books in 2024.

“A symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated,” she said.

“I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year. Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing.”

Three science awards were announced earlier this week. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday. The final award for Economic Sciences will be presented on Monday, which marks the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s 1896 death.

Carson is the 123rd recipient of the prize, which has now been awarded 119 times between 1901 and 2026.

It was last year awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

Additional reporting by AFP