Why the woman who won the Nobel Prize for Literature wears boxing gloves

October 18, 2026 — 4:00am

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Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize for Literature this month. She wasn’t the odds-on favourite – that was the Chinese experimental fiction writer Can Xue. She wasn’t the crowd-pleasing choice either – that would’ve been Salman Rushdie, or Margaret Atwood, or Thomas Pynchon or Helen Garner, or really almost anybody but Carson, a Canadian-Icelandic poet and classics professor whom (let’s face it) very few people had heard of. But she was the right choice.

Carson spent much of her career teaching ancient Greek in classics departments in Canada and the US, and almost all her Nobel Prize-winning poems are inventive translations or creative transformations of ancient texts, including Euripides, Aeschylus, Sappho and Catullus. Her modern literary influences include Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.

Since the 1990s, Carson has been one of the poetry world’s anointed ones, canonised in classics and English departments and independent poetry........

© Brisbane Times