Canadian poet Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in literature

Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson has been awarded the nobel prize in literature, the Swedish Academy has announced.

The author is recognised from her “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” the academy said.

Born in 1950 in Toronto, she is celebrated for her work which blurs the boundaries between poetry, prose and scholarship.

Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, was published in 1986. It combined an analysis of desire of desire in the ancient Greece tradition with literary criticism.

Carson is best known for Autobiography of Red, published in 1998, a novel inspired by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus, and reimagining the myth of the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, Geryon, as the story of a modern teenage boy navigating heartbreak and desire.

Throughout her career, she has received a number of prestigious awards, becoming the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize for her collection The Beauty of the Husband ; and receiving the Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.

The Nobel Prize is awarded for a lifetime's body of work and is regarded as the most prestigious award in global literature with the winner receiving 12 million Swedish kronor (€1.07 million).

It has been awarded on 118 previous occasions since 1901 ; only 18 of whom have been women. Recent laureates include Bob Dylan, László Krasznahorkai, Annie Ernaux, Abdulrazak Gurnah and more.