Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, 76, won the Nobel Prize for Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” She is the author of Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), among other works.
The committee writes, “Anne Carson has, throughout her entire career, combined poetry writing with translation work and teaching at various universities. 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. She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work.”
Knopf tells PL that there are 100,000 copies of Autobiography of Red in print. Deb Garrison, Carson’s editor at Knopf, writes. “Anne Carson’s brilliant work is a gift to our literature and to readers everywhere. Her poetry travels across centuries our human experience as it deconstructs — and revels in — the language we have used since the time of the ancients to explain ourselves to the world and to each other. Love, climate, culture, beauty and the many voices that speak them into existence are all lit on the page by her blazing intelligence and candor, as she invites us continually into an ongoing dialogue of existential significance.”
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