STOCKHOLM — Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson, celebrated for work that freely blends verse, prose, dialogue and translation, was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, with the Swedish Academy honoring what it called her “bold and inventive oeuvre.”

Asked how she was feeling after learning she had won while staying on the Arctic island, Carson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV: “Crazy, I think they’re all crazy. I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book.”

Carson, 76, was born in Toronto and has a home in Iceland. Permanent Secretary Ingrid Carlberg said the writer had been taken by surprise when called with the news. The Academy awards the prize, which is worth 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million). “All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind,” Carlberg told a press conference in Stockholm after the announcement.

Carson is widely known for her translations of classical Greek literature, which heavily influence her own writing — a body of work that ranges from opera libretti to literary criticism and verse novels such as “Autobiography of Red” from 1998.

“Genre is something for booksellers. It’s something you do in order to appeal to an audience and make them buy books. And on what shelf do you put Anne Carson’s books? It’s on a shelf of her own,” said Swedish novelist Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the award committee. “That’s what I like about her.”

‘New Forms for Contemporary Literature’

In its citation, the Swedish Academy said it was recognizing Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

“Almost all her literary production has centered upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” the Academy said. “She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work. Her translations from Classical Greek may be regarded as independent works in their own right.”

Her style is exemplified in 2019’s “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” a performance piece that mixes the story of Helen of Troy from Euripides’ play “Helen” with that of Marilyn Monroe.

Life Without Proust

Often heralded as her greatest work, “Autobiography of Red” demonstrates Carson’s ability to “actualize the classical literary tradition,” the Academy said. In the book, she re-examines age-old questions such as “What happens when you love someone who will ultimately destroy you?”

Carson has also tapped into more modern inspirations. In “The Albertine Workout,” she reflected on the character of Albertine, one of the love interests of the narrator Marcel in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” Carson had spent seven years reading Proust masterpiece and said in a 2016 interview with Canada’s CBC Radio One that she suffered withdrawal symptoms after finishing it, leading her to write “The Albertine Workout” as a way to prolong the experience.

“You think life goes on after Proust, but it seems so grey,” she said.

Boxing Lessons to Fight Parkinson’s

Carson began taking boxing lessons while already in her 70s after a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. The sport is recommended as a therapy because it helps with hand-eye coordination and the sequencing of actions.

Reflecting on the disease’s impact on her handwriting in an interview at the Louisiana Literary Festival in Denmark in 2024, she said: “I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame … the shame of bad handwriting.”

Carson, who has taught classics at universities in Canada and the United States, has said she considers herself a visual artist as much as a literary one.

“I think of making a poem as making an object. I have always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language,” she said in the CBC interview.

Poetry, she says, may be better attuned to fast modern-day life than long-form writing. “I think it’s probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster and everybody is in a hurry so basically it’s good because it is brief,” she told the Icelandic broadcaster on Thursday.

Asked by the Nobel Committee about her own sources of inspiration, however, she named the ancient Greek poet Homer, author of the epic “The Odyssey.” As to how the classical stories she has reinterpreted in her work might be relevant to modern audiences, she said: “I don’t think I’m interested in relevance.”

‘At Home’ in Iceland and New York

Carson and her husband, artist Robert Currie, first came to Iceland after the 2008 banking collapse and gradually spent more time there. “We got to know people and we liked the people,” Carson told Iceland Review in 2023. She has held Icelandic citizenship since 2022.

Currie told magazine that Iceland was one of only two places that immediately felt like home to him, the other being New York City in the 1970s.

A Prize Dating to 1901

Literature was the fourth of this year’s Nobels to be announced this week, following medicine, physics and chemistry. The peace prize winner will be announced in Oslo on Friday.

Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes have been awarded since 1901. Widely regarded as the world’s most prestigious literary award, the honor is customarily presented to the year’s laureate at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. Carson, who had been among the favorites for this year’s award, takes her place beside luminaries such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway as a recipient of the honor. Last year’s prize was won by Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

($1 = 10.0190 Swedish crowns)

— Reuters