Canadian poet Anne Carson won the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature. Also an accomplished essayist and critic who has received Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Carson was considered an odds-on favorite to win the prize.

Carson is known for drawing on her classical education and blending them with modern observations. She writes on ethics, grief and desire, exploring deep themes through her poetry and prose.

A rule-bender who has incorporated visual elements into her work, Carson gained fame with her first book of criticism, Eros the Bittersweet, released in 1986. Her 1998 novel in verse, Autobiography of Red, retold the myth of Heracles and Geryon for modern day.

Another work, The Beauty of the Husband (2001), was fiction told in 29 tangos that explored heartbreak. She won the T.S. Eliot Prize for that work.

Ingrid Carlberg, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said she reached Carson in Iceland, where she was “listening to the........

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