Original subtitles

On the morning of the 8th of October, 2026, a poet sat in her kitchen by the

sea in Reykjavik, eating crackers, drinking tea, and reading the London

Review of Books.

She noticed that the floor needed sweeping, and got up to sweep it.

Then the phone started ringing, and she kept turning it off.

She always does, she told the Nobel Prizes interviewer afterwards.

In the end, her husband answered and made her call back.

It was the Swedish Academy.

The Nobel Prize in Literature, with an award of 12 million Swedish kronor, had

gone to Anne Carson.

Her answer, in her own words, Well, who would expect it, for heaven's sakes?

How does a banker's daughter from small-town Ontario, who learned ancient

Greek from her Latin teacher over the lunch hour, end up in that kitchen?

Why would a poet turn a red-winged monster from a Greek poem more than two

and a half thousand years old into a teenage boy?

Why print a translation whose pages are full of empty brackets?

Why gather the fragments of a brother's life into a box?

And what did the Academy mean when it said that her work had created new forms

for contemporary literature?

This is the entire story of Anne Carson, the classicist who became a Nobel

laureate, told from the public record and from her own words.

Chapter One The Banker's Daughter 1950-1974

In grade 13, at the high school in Port Hope, Ontario, a student told her Latin

teacher that she wanted to learn Greek.

There was no Greek class, and nobody else was asking for one.

So the teacher, whom Carson has named as Mrs. Cowan, offered to teach her herself

over the lunch hour.

The two of them read Sappho together.

Decades later, Carson told the Paris Review that it was simply revolutionary.

Grade 13 in the Ontario of those years was a final year of high school kept for

students heading to university.

How did a girl in a small lakeside town come to want Greek at all?

The short answer is that nobody planned it.

Port Hope was one of a string of Ontario towns the family lived in.

because of her father's job, and it happened to have a Latin teacher who

also knew Greek, and who was willing to give up her lunch.

Anne Carson was born in Toronto on the 21st of June, 1950.

Her father worked for a bank.

In the Canadian system of the time, as she later described it, bank managers

were moved to a new branch about every three years.

so that they would learn different communities and different kinds of

banking.

She summed it up in one line.

It's hard on the family, good for the bank.

That meant a new town, a new house, and a new school every few years.

Her brother Michael, four years older, made the same moves.

She has described in her readings how he teased her with two nicknames.

Professor, and Pinhead.

The Paris Review's introduction to its interview with her, published in 2004,

names some of the places.

Stoney Creek, near Hamilton, Port Hope, on the north shore of Lake Ontario,

and Timmins, in the north of the province.

Her father, it says, worked for the Toronto Dominion Bank.

Carson herself has said that the family lived in Port Hope for six or seven

years, and her parents for longer.

She has also described what the moves taught her.

Driving away from one town, waving goodbye to friends she would not see

again, she decided that next time she would not make friends at all, because

there was no future in it.

She did make friends, she said, but more carefully.

with half her mind always thinking that she would soon be leaving.

Some of what she would become was already visible in school.

She has told the story of a lesson in grade two, when the class was asked to

draw a barnyard, and the teacher said they could add a story to explain the

picture.

Putting a story and a picture together, she said, felt like a breakthrough.

The two never quite separated again in her work.

Port Hope stayed with her for other reasons, too.

Long afterwards, she told the Paris Review that she dreaded passing the town

on the train to Toronto.

She began to describe it in stronger words, then corrected herself.

It was the place, she said, where she and her brother had come to the end of

their adolescence.

She went no further in that interview, and neither will we.

Then there was Latin.

Before Greek came into her life, she was already reading the Roman poets in

class.

One poem in particular stayed with her.

It was the short elegy that Catullus wrote at his brother's grave near Troy

in the first century before Christ.

She has said she first met it in high school Latin and tried to translate it

for years afterwards.

We will see what she finally did with it.

Catullus was born in Verona.

in the north of Italy, in the early first century before Christ, and died

young, around the age of 30.

He wrote love poems, insults, jokes, and elegies, often in meters borrowed from

the Greeks.

His brother died far from home, in the region of Troy, and Catullus made the

long journey to the grave.

The poem that commemorates the visit is ten lines long.

and it ends with the words that every student of Latin learns.

Ave atque vale.

Hail and farewell.

Greek was different.

In her Paris Review interview, she explained why.

Greek, she said, seemed to her to go deeper into words than any modern

language.

Reading it, you are down among the roots, where words do their work.

In English, by her account, we are up in the branches, bouncing around.

It was a revelation, she said, and it never stopped being one.

And the Greek she read with Mrs. Cowan was Sappho.

Sappho lived on the island of Lesvos, off the coast of modern Turkey, around

600 years before Christ.

The ancient Greeks counted her among their greatest poets.

Almost all of her work is lost.

What survives is one complete poem and a few hundred lines of fragments, many no

longer than a word or two.

The most famous of those fragments describes what happens to the body when

the beloved is near.

In the prose translation that the Victorian scholar Henry Thornton Wharton

published, the speaker says, My tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle

fire has run under my skin.

A grade 13 student in Port Hope was reading lines like that in the original,

over lunch, with a teacher who had offered her time for nothing.

At school, she also found Oscar Wilde.

She told the Paris Review that she and a few friends were so taken with him that

they dressed like him, memorized his sayings, and staged conversations in the

lunchroom, as if they were Wilde and his circle.

She said it gave her an education in style.

and a habit of irony towards herself that she found useful later on.

After high school, she went to the University of Toronto, to St. Michael's

College. It did not go smoothly.

She left, and came back, and left again.

The Poetry Foundation's account of her life says simply that she dropped out

twice before earning her degrees.

The detail matters because nothing in her later career followed a straight

line either.

She came back for good, and she came back to classics.

In 1974, she took her Bachelor of Arts at Toronto.

By then, Greek and Latin were her subject, the languages she had first met

in a Latin classroom and at a lunch table in Port Hope.

Her degrees, all three of them in the end, would come from Toronto, a fact the

university was quick to point out on the day of the Nobel announcement.

Her own account of those years is short, and she has never dressed it up.

A Latin teacher in a small Ontario town offered a student a language nobody else

had asked for.

The student went on to teach Greek and classics at universities in Canada and

the United States, and Greek texts would inform much of her writing.

By the summer of 1974, she was a classics graduate with a taste for

drawing. a love of Oscar Wilde, and a lifelong attachment to two ancient

poets, Sappho and Catullus.

Next, she would take a master's degree at Toronto and then go abroad, to

Scotland, to study Greek meter and textual criticism at the University of

St. Andrews.

Before we fall over to Scotland, one small thing from me.

If you would like more complete stories like this one about the people and the

ideas that shaped our world, subscribe.

Her first book would be built on a single word from Sappho.

Chapter Two Bittersweet 1975-1987

In 1981, the University of Toronto accepted a doctoral thesis in

Classics with a Latin title, Odi et Amo Ergo Sum.

It means, I hate and I love, therefore I am.

The first three words belong to Catalyst.

The last two echo the philosopher René Descartes and his famous sentence, I

think, therefore I am.

Its author was Anne Carson, then about 30, and its subject was love and desire

in Greek poetry.

How do you get from a lunch hour in Port Hope to a doctorate on desire?

The road ran through two universities and two countries.

In 1975, she finished a master's degree in classics at Toronto.

Then she went to Scotland, to the University of St. Andrews, where she

spent a year on the technical end of the subject, Greek meter and the criticism

of ancient texts, and took a diploma.

Meter is the music of Greek verse, the organization of long and short syllables

into recurring patterns.

Textual criticism is the work of deciding what an ancient author actually

wrote, when the manuscripts that survive disagree or break off or are full of

holes.

Both are slow exacting skills.

Both show in her later books, from poems built on counted forms to the printed

gaps of her Sappho.

She came back to Toronto to finish the doctorate.

Before it was done, she was already teaching.

Her career began at the University of Calgary in 1979.

And in 1980, she joined Princeton University in New Jersey.

Through most of the 1980s, she taught Greek and Latin there, first as an

instructor and then as an assistant professor.

Preston was a small world.

The novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who taught there too, remembered meeting

Carson in those years.

On the 8th of October, 2026, as CBC reported, she called her truly an

unclassifiable imagination and listed what she meant.

Poet, translator, essayist, philosopher, and observer of life.

The thesis title points straight at Catullus.

His poem, 85, is only two lines long.

In the prose translation published by Leonard Smithers in 1894, it reads, I

hate and I love.

Wherefore do I sow, per adventure thou askest?

I know not, but I feel it to be thus.

and I suffer.

Two feelings at once, held together and not resolved.

That was the subject she had chosen.

In 1986, her early poetry sequence, Canicula Diana, appeared in the

Quarterly Review of Literature, in a volume of its contemporary poetry

series, and received the magazine's Betty Colliday Award.

It was a small debut.

a contribution to a shared volume rather than a book of her own.

The book that made her name with scholars came two years later.

In 1986, Princeton University Press published Eros the Bittersweet, an

essay.

It grew out of the doctoral thesis, and on its surface, it is a work of

classical scholarship, with footnotes, Greek words, and close readings of

ancient texts.

but it does not read like one.

The chapters are short.

The sentences are clear and often startling.

It moves from Sappho to Plato to the Greek novelists to modern ideas about

reading and writing, as if it were following one long thought.

Its starting point is a single word.

Sappho, in a fragment of two lines, calls Eros, the god of desire,

Glucopicron.

It is a compound she seems to have coined, made of the Greek words for

sweet and bitter, in that order.

In English, we say bittersweet, putting the bitter first.

Sappho put the sweet first.

The Victorian scholar Henry Thornton Wharton translated the fragment in his

edition of Sappho, and his version reads, Now love masters my limbs and

shakes me, fatal creature, bittersweet.

The Nobel Committee, writing about Carson in 2026, described the same word

as Carson's

argument, in brief, is that desire

depends on distance.

The Nobel Committee summed it up as the distance between the lover and the

beloved, which gives desire its strength.

In her reading, the lover wants what remains out of reach.

And closing the distance changes the conditions that gave the wanting its

force.

So love poems are full of obstacles and triangles and third parties.

She reads Sappho's famous fragment about the man who sits near the beloved in

this way.

Not as a poem about jealousy of the man, but as a poem about the space between

the lover and the one she loves.

That idea of holding two things at once runs through the book.

and threw everything after it.

The Nobel Committee quoted Carson's own phrase from Eros the Bittersweet, a

stereoscopic vision, the ability to hold two perspectives in balance at the same

time. The ancient material is handled as a classicist handles it.

Sappho's Fragments, Plato's Dialogue of the Phaedrus, where Socrates talks about

love and madness, and the Greek prose romances written under the Roman Empire.

with their long separations of lovers.

Plato matters to the argument for a particular reason.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates gives a second speech about love, and the bodily signs

he describes, the shivering, the sweat, the heat, seem to echo Sappho's

description of desire in her most famous fragment.

Carson reads the two side by side, the poet and the philosopher, more than two

centuries apart.

describing the same experience in different words.

The Greek novels come later still, from roughly the first to the fourth

centuries of the Christian era.

Keraton's Caleroe, Longus's Daphnis and Chloe,

Achilles' Tatius and Heliodorus.

Many of them delay the reunion of their young lovers with journeys, abductions,

shipwrecks, and other obstacles.

For Carson, that was the point.

The novel, like the love poem, keeps the lovers at a distance, because the

distance is what keeps the story going.

What readers noticed in the end was the voice.

A work of scholarship read like an essay by a poet.

It took time to be noticed outside the field.

The essayist John De Agata later described its reception in three waves,

first among classicists, then among essayists, and only in the 1990s among

poets.

In 1999, readers voting for the modern library placed Eros the Bittersweet on

their list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.

The novelist and scholar Andre Asselman mentioned that honor when he introduced

her at a lecture in New York.

Meanwhile, she was teaching.

From the summer of 1986 to the summer of 1987, she was a scholar in residence at

the 92nd Street Y in New York, where, according to the accounts of her career,

she worked on a translation of Sophocles' Electra.

That translation would not be published for another 14 years.

The play is about a daughter who cannot stop grieving.

Her father, Agamemnon, has been murdered by her mother and her mother's lover.

An Electra waits for years for her exiled brother, Orestes, to come home

and take revenge.

Sophocles wrote it in the 5th century before Christ.

Carson would come back to the same family again and again.

In Sophocles, in Euripides, and in Aeschylus.

Not everything went well at Princeton.

As the New York Times reported on the day of the Nobel announcement, the

university had not given her tenure.

She left in 1987 and taught for a year at Emory University in Atlanta.

After Atlanta came a move north, back to Canada.

By the late 1980s, she was teaching classics at McGill University in

Montreal.

She was not yet widely known as a poet.

She was a classicist with one remarkable book.

In Montreal, she began to write things that looked like lectures and turned out

to be poems.

Chapter 3.

Short Talks, Long Poems.

1988-1997.

In 1992, a small press in London, Ontario, called Brick Books, published a

thin book of prose pieces called Short Talks.

Each one was a paragraph or two, each with a title like a lecture.

Short Talk on This or That, one for example, was a short talk on trout.

It was her first full collection of poems, if they were poems.

A few had appeared in print before.

Brick Books reissued it in 2015, with a new afterword by the author and an

introduction by the poet Margaret Christakis.

CNN, reporting the Nobel Prize in 2026, noted that she had been 42 when it

appeared.

How did a professor of classics end up writing lectures a paragraph long?

She has explained it herself.

Short talks, she told the Paris Review, began as a set of drawings, each with a

title underneath.

Then she expanded the titles a little.

Gradually she realized that nobody was interested in the drawings.

So she took the drawings away.

And what was left were the titles, which had grown into small pieces of a

lecture.

In a reading at the Walker Art Center in 2011, she called a short talk a lecture

of about 13 seconds.

The trout poem, she said, had a picture of a fisherman.

In that interview, published in 2004, she said she kept the manuscript at

home, with all the drawings in it, and that nobody had ever liked them.

Drawing, she said, frightened her more than writing did.

You cannot disguise yourself in a drawing.

Writing, by comparison, was play.

The book was small, but it had not come out of nowhere.

Through the late 1980s, she had been publishing essays and poems in

magazines.

One essay, Kinds of Water, was chosen by the writer Annie Dillard for the Best

American Essays of 1988.

A poem, The Life of Towns, appeared in the Best American Poetry of 1990, chosen

by Jory Graham.

An essay called Shaloxymoron was collected from the New York magazine

Grand Street, edited by Ben Sonnenberg.

Water ran through those early pieces.

Kinds of water would later become part of a longer work about water.

Another piece, Water Margins, an essay on swimming by my brother, was printed

in the Journey Prize Anthology of New Canadian Writing in 1994.

She was writing in the gaps between genres.

Essays that behaved like poems, poems that looked like essays, and lectures

that stopped after a paragraph.

editors kept finding places to put them.

All this time, she was teaching at McGill University and Montreal in a

department of classics.

In the Paris Review interview published in 2004, she described how her working

days were shaped by then.

In the morning, she went for a walk, came back, made tea and breakfast, and

read for an hour.

Then she moved to her desks.

There were three of them.

with a different project open on each.

One academic, one for writing, one for art.

She went between them, she said, without a fixed order, sometimes visiting all

three within an hour, and the projects fed each other.

Asked why she wrote it all, she gave an answer that has been quoted many times

since.

I write to find out what I think about something.

Writing was not a way of reporting a thought she already had.

It was a way of having one.

In 1995, two of her books came out in the same year, from two New York

publishers.

The first was Plainwater, Essays in Poetry, from Alfred A. Knopf.

The second was Glass, Irony, and God, from New Directions, with an

introduction by Guy Davenport.

the American writer and translator of ancient Greek poetry.

Plain Water collected the prose, including a long work called The

Anthropology of Water.

Part of it describes a pilgrimage on foot across northern Spain to the Shrine

of St. James at Santiago de Compostela.

She told the Paris Review that she had really made the walk.

It was 380 miles and took six weeks, she said.

And she did it in a pair of running shoes that were already ten years old.

She walked with a friend, a companion whom the book calls My Sid, after the

medieval Spanish hero El Sid.

Every evening she wrote in small notebooks about the walking, about

penance, and about the man she was with.

Out of those notebooks came a work that moves between travel writing, diary,

essay, and poem, and never settles on any one of them.

The MacArthur Foundation, in its published profile of her, listed the

materials those two books drew on.

Emily Bronte and Gertrude Stein, medieval Japanese pilgrimage accounts,

and the ancient Greek poets Mimnermis, Alcaeus, and Sappho.

It is an unlikely list, and the books held it together.

The second book, Glass, Irony, and God, opened with a long poem called The Glass

Essay, more than 30 pages of short stanzas.

A woman whose relationship has ended goes to stay with her mother in a house

on the Moors.

She takes with her the novels and poems of Emily Bronte, who wrote about Moors

of her own.

The Nobel Committee writing about it in 2026, described the scene as three

lonely women at a kitchen table.

The narrator, her mother, and Emily Bronte.

The poem is a story of loss told in short stanzas, and at the same time a

reading of Bronte, and at the same time an essay about abandonment.

The committee said it demonstrates the potential of the long poem.

where genre boundaries are seen to blur.

In the committee's reading, the poetry needs the story, and the story depends

on the leaps and changes of scene that the poetry allows.

She has said that the glass essay began with an image.

She was staring, she told the Paris Review, at a frozen ditch near her

mother's house, and the poem grew from that.

Particular images, she said, start the thinking.

So do phrases overheard on a bus and sentences that come to her in dreams,

which she writes down.

Most of them, she admitted, are nonsense.

Now and then, one seems to open a door.

The same book held an essay that would have a long life of its own, The Gender

of Sound, about how the voices of women have been heard and judged from ancient

Greece onward.

In 2025, a London publisher, Silver Press, reissued it as a small book of

its own, three decades after it first appeared.

The prizes started to come.

In 1996, she received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

In 1997 came the Pushcart Prize, which honors work published by small presses.

In the same year, the London publisher Faber and Faber printed The Glass Essay

in an anthology called Wild Workshop.

By the end of 1997, she had real literary recognition.

A professor of classics in Montreal, with a study from Princeton, a small

book from Brick Books, two collections from New York publishers, and two

prizes.

The book that would bring her a far wider readership was still to come.

That changed with her next book.

It was built on the fragments of a Greek poem about a monster.

She had first tried to write it as prose, she said, and it sounded wrong.

In 1998, she published it in verse in New York.

Chapter 4.

The Red Monster 1998-1999 In 1998,

the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf, brought out a book with a strange title,

Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse.

Its hero was a boy with red skin and red wings called Garion, who grows up shy

and lonely, falls in love with an older boy called Heracles, and has his heart

broken.

The boy was a monster from Greek myth.

The book was, by most accounts, the one that made Anne Carson's name.

How does a monster from a Greek poem end up in high school?

To answer that, we have to go back to the poem and to the man who wrote it

more than two and a half thousand years before.

His name, Ustasikaris.

Ancient writers placed his life around 600 years before Christ in the Greek

cities of southern Italy and Sicily, though the exact dates they give are

doubtful.

He was famous for telling the great stories of myth, the kind Homer told in

epic, and long lyric poems meant to be sung.

Ancient readers ranked him among the nine great lyric poets of Greece,

alongside Sappho.

Almost all of his work is lost.

One of his poems told the story of Garion.

In the myth, Garion is a giant who lives on Erethea, the Red Island.

Far in the west, near the edge of the world where the sun sets.

He keeps a herd of red cattle, guarded by a herdsman and a two-headed dog.

In some ancient accounts, he has three bodies.

In Stasichorus, as a later writer reported, he had wings.

The hero Heracles is sent to steal the cattle.

It is one of his twelve labors, traditionally the tenth.

He kills the dog with his club, and the herdsman too.

Then Geryon comes out to fight, and Heracles kills him with an arrow

poisoned in the blood of the Hydra.

The story was a favorite of Greek painters, and it survives on vases, with

the hero, the cattle, and the winged monster falling.

Stasicurus' poem about this, the Geryonites, survives only in pieces.

Most of what we have came out of the sands of Egypt.

on a papyrus from the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus, which was published in

1967.

A line count marked on the papyrus shows that the poem ran to at least 1,300

lines. Its full length is unknown.

What survives is scattered fragments, full of gaps.

But the fragments are surprising, and critics have long noticed how human they

make the monster.

His mother, Caleroas, begs him not to fight.

And another figure warns him of the danger.

And when the arrow strikes him in the forehead, in one surviving passage, he

bends his neck to one side, like a poppy that sheds its petals all at once.

The killer is a famous hero.

The victim, in this poem, is the one we feel for.

The finished book includes her own versions of those fragments.

For the modern story, she tried prose first.

She told the Paris Review that she typed out an early part of the book as prose,

and it sounded stupid, all tangled in on itself.

She sent it to Ben Sonnenberg, the editor of Grand Street, and he told her

to throw it out.

The book she finally published, in verse, is built like a strange piece of

scholarship.

It opens with an essay on Stesichorus.

and his use of adjectives, under the title Red Meat.

Then come her own loose translations of the fragments of the Gerionii, followed

by three appendices about Stesichorus and Helen of Troy.

Only then does the novel begin.

It ends with an interview with Stesichorus, which is invented.

That last detail matters, because Stesichorus has a second famous story

attached to him, and it is about Helen.

The philosopher Plato tells it in the Phaedrus.

Stesichorus, he says, wrote verses insulting Helen and was struck blind.

So he wrote a recantation.

In Benjamin Jowett's Victorian translation, it begins, False is that

word of mine.

The truth is that thou didst not embark in ships nor ever go to the walls of

Troy.

And his sight came back.

The novel itself moves Geryon into a world that looks like our own.

He is a sensitive boy, red and winged, living with his family on an island.

He starts writing an autobiography as a child.

At 14, he meets Heracles, two years older, who arrives on a bus and

becomes his first love.

Then Heracles leaves him.

Years later, they meet again by chance in Buenos Aires, where Heracles is

traveling with a new partner, Ancash.

And the three of them go on together to Peru, to the volcanoes.

The Nobel Committee in 2026 described what she had done to the myth.

She recast the terrifying giant, it wrote, as a tender hero devoted to his

mother.

who falls in love with the smug and boorish Heracles.

The critic Adam Kirsch, reviewing the book in the New Republic, put the change

in one sentence.

In Carson, Heracles breaks Geryon's heart and steals his innocence.

As Geryon grows up, he turns from writing to photography.

Many of the last chapters of the novel are named as photographs and describe

pictures he takes.

It can be read as a book about a monster who becomes an artist, and he refuses to

let monstrosity define him.

It is written in long, loose lines and short, plain sentences.

And as the critic Catherine Schultz noted in an essay for New York

Magazine's Vulture, it is often funny.

The book did something poetry rarely does.

It sold.

By one account, it had sold at least 25,000 copies by the year 2000.

It won a prize from the Quebec Writers' Federation, and it was a finalist for

the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In the magazine Poetry, in December 1998, the critic John Taylor praised the

way it let real emotions struggle to the surface.

Not every critic agreed.

The poet Mark Halliday, writing in the Chicago Review, was more doubtful and

complained that parts of it felt stretched.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Oliver Reynolds admired its blend of thought

and feeling, but doubted that it fully worked as a novel in verse.

Others praised it in print, including Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Susan

Sontag.

The Nobel Committee in 2026 said that it was often heralded as Carson's greatest

work.

It became the place where most new readers start.

On the 8th of October, 2026, when she was asked where a new reader should

begin, Carson said that most people read the autobiography because it seems

accessible. The committee member, Steve Sem Sandberg, suggested the same book.

as a verse novel that uses the myth of Heracles' labors to tell the story of a

lonely adolescent in love.

In the same year, 1998, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, and

her first British collection, Glass and God, came out in London from Jonathan

Cape.

Glass and God was her first book of poetry published in Britain.

and according to the record of the prize, it was shortlisted that year for

the forward prize.

The world outside Montreal was starting to notice.

Her next book was scholarship again, at least on its cover.

In 1999, Princeton University Press published Economy of the Unlost, with

the subtitle Reading Simonides of Chaos with Paul Ceylon.

It sets side-by-side two poets two and a half thousand years apart.

Simonides lived in the late 6th and early 5th centuries before Christ, and

he was famous for epitaphs, the short verses carved on tombs and monuments.

The historian Herodotus, describing the graves of the Greeks who died at

Thermopylae, credits Simonides with the epitaph for the seer Megistius.

He also records a separate inscription for the Spartans, which later tradition

gave to Simonides as well.

In A.D. Godley's translation, it reads, Foreigner, go tell the Spartans that we

lie here, obedient to their command.

Paul Ceylon was a German-language poet, born in 1920, who survived the Holocaust

and wrote some of the most difficult and important poetry of the 20th century.

Carson read the two together.

the ancient writer of epitaphs, who was also remembered as a poet who wrote for

pay, and the modern poet who wrote in the language of the people who had

murdered his parents.

How did she come to put them side by side?

She told the Paris Review that she did it by accident.

The two happened to be on her desk at the same time.

What interested her, she said, was what she did with the link once it was there.

She described following it like a hound with its nose to the ground, tracking

not a scent but shapes.

By the end of the decade, she had published a scholarly study, a verse

novel that sold like fiction, and three collections of essays and poems.

She was 49.

In the next three years, a run of the largest prizes in poetry would come to

her.

The Prize Years and the Brackets 2000-2003 In

2000, the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago named Anne Carson one of its

fellows.

She was 50, a professor of classics at McGill University in Montreal who had

spent the previous academic year as a visiting professor in the United States,

and the foundation described her as a poet and classicist.

Its citation called her a scholar trained in the classics who has

developed an independent voice as both a poet and an essayist.

The fellowship is often called the genius grant.

It comes with no conditions at all.

How did the honors arrive so quickly?

The MacArthur recognized the work already behind her.

Then came three books in quick succession, each different from the

last.

Two of them won the largest prizes in poetry, and the third became one of the

best-known translations of its kind.

The first was Men in the Off Hours, published by Knopf in 2000.

It is a mixed collection.

Short poems, verse essays, epitaphs, interviews, scripts, and

translations from Greek and Latin.

Its opening essay sets two writers side by side who never could have met.

the Athenian historian Thucydides, who wrote about war in the 5th century

before Christ, and the English novelist Virginia Woolf.

The MacArthur Foundation summed up the method of the book in a phrase, She

collapses the ancient into the modern.

The Nobel Committee in 2026 chose the same pairing to describe her, Thucydides

aligned with Woolf.

as an example of the unexpected literary constellations with which, it said, she

had broken away from lyric poetry bound to the narrative self.

In 2001, Men in the Off Hours won the first Griffin Poetry Prize, which was

then new, in the category for Canadian Poet.

The judges wrote that she continues to redefine what a book of poetry can be.

In 2014,

Red Dock would make her the first writer to win the Griffins Canadian Prize

twice.

The second book came out the same year, The Beauty of the Husband, a fictional

essay in 29 tangos.

Also from Knopf, tells the story of a marriage that goes wrong, from first

attraction to betrayal, separation, and its long aftermath.

The Nobel Committee called it a cutting and sardonic row with a deceitful

husband.

It is divided into 29 sections, which she called tangos.

Her own subtitle calls the book a fictional essay, not a novel and not a

sequence of poems, though it is written in lines of verse.

The Nobel Committee noted that Keats's sublime words about beauty and truth are

set in brutal yet playful fashion.

against an exhausting drama of a relationship.

Each tango opens with lines by the English romantic poet John Keats.

Among the best-known lines Keats wrote are the last ones of his Ode on a

Grecian Urn, published in 1820.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to

know.

Carson set that claim against a story in which beauty and the husband's beauty in

particular, turns out to be anything but truthful.

The Beauty of the Husband won the T.S. Eliot Prize for 2001, one of the most

important poetry prizes in Britain.

Carson was the first woman to win it.

In the New York Times Book Review, the critic Daphne Merkin wrote that she did

not think there had been a book since Robert Lowell's life studies.

that has advanced the art of poetry quite as radically as Anne Carson is in

the process of doing.

That same year, Oxford University Press published her translation of Sophocles'

Electra, in an edition with an introduction and notes by the classicist

Michael Shaw, the play she had begun more than a decade earlier in New York.

It was the first of what would become a long series of Greek tragedies in her

versions, many of them later staged.

And then, in 2002, came the third book of the run.

Knopf published If Not Winter, Fragments of Sappho.

It translated every fragment of Sappho in the standard edition she worked from,

with the Greek on one page and the English on the facing page.

More pieces of Sappho came to light after it appeared, in 2004 and in 2014.

Its most unusual feature,

Carson did not tidy the fragments into finished poems.

Where the papyrus is torn or a word is missing, she printed a square bracket

and left the space empty.

Some pages hold only a few words scattered among brackets and white

paper.

Why print the gaps?

To understand that, you need to know where the words came from.

For centuries, the only lines of Sappho anyone could read were quotations in the

works of later writers, who had copied a stanza here and a phrase there to make a

point about grammar or meter or style.

Then, at the end of the 19th century, the sand of Egypt started to give her

back.

In the winter of 1896, two young English scholars, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur

Hunt, began digging the ancient rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, a town on the

edge of the Nile Valley.

Within months, they had found a scrap of papyrus with part of a poem by Sappho.

In the first volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri in 1898, they wrote, It is not

very likely that we shall find another poem of Sappho.

They were wrong.

More fragments came out of the same rubbish heaps over the following years,

including pieces of an ancient edition of her first book.

In 1914 they published the end of that book, where a scribe had written its

length.

The book, they reported, had held 1,320 lines, which is 330

stanzas.

By their estimate, Her whole work may once have run to something like 9,000

lines.

What survives is about 650 lines out of a body of work that scholars

usually put at around 10,000.

Only one poem is certainly complete.

Many fragments are a single word.

That is the material Carson was translating.

Carson herself cautioned that the brackets are a gesture towards the

damaged papyrus, not an exact record of every gap.

She has explained the attraction herself.

In the Paris Review, she described the layers of time on a sheet of papyrus.

Written in the third century before Christ, copied, wrapped around a mummy

for a couple of hundred years, found, put in a museum, pieced together by

scholars.

photographed and printed in a book.

All those layers, she said, add up to more and more life.

And she described what a fragment does to a reader.

The way a poem breaks off, she said, leads into a thought that can never be

completed. The space where a thought would be.

I love that space, she said.

Nothing fully worked out, she added, could be as arresting as the suggestion

of a thought.

that the gap leaves behind the book was widely praised and it became one of the

best known modern translations of sappho not everyone was convinced reviewing

it in the new york review of books the classicist and critic daniel mendelson

was among those who questioned how much work the white space was being asked to

do the argument about the brackets went on in reviews and scholarship for years

afterwards

The Nobel Committee in 2026 singled out her Sappho among her translations and

said that her translations from classical Greek may be regarded as

independent works in their own right.

The lunch hours in Port Hope, reading Sappho with Mrs. Cowan, had ended in a

book that put every fragment of the poet then known into English.

Just after Christmas in 2002, Carson sat down with the writer Will Aiken.

for the interview that the Paris Review would publish as The Art of Poetry, No.

88.

Much of what she has said in public about her method, her childhood, and her

work comes from those conversations, held over several hours with cups of

oolong tea.

By 2003, she was a MacArthur Fellow, a Griffin winner, and the first woman to

win the T.S. Eliot Prize, with a celebrated translation of Sappho in

print.

She had left McGill in 2002, and by 2003, she was a professor at the

University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, teaching classical studies, comparative

literature, and English.

Behind all of that was a private loss, which she would turn into her most

personal book.

In 2000, her brother Michael had died in Denmark.

The book she made for him would not be published for another ten years.

In 2000,

a man living in Copenhagen telephoned his younger sister.

It was Anne Carson's brother, Michael, four years older than she was.

She had not seen him for 22 years.

She has described the call in public readings and conversations since.

It came out of the blue, and they began to plan a visit.

Before it could happen, he died.

In Denmark, that same year.

How do you mourn someone who was a stranger for most of your adult life?

Her answer was a handmade book, which stayed private for years before it

appeared, in 2010,

as a book in a box.

He was a mystery to me, she told the Paris Review, when the book was still a

private object on her shelf.

She wanted to gather up the pieces of his story, she said, and make them into

something that could be contained.

She has spoken in public about parts of his life and his disappearance.

Her brother left Canada at the end of the 1970s and did not come back.

For years, by her account, she heard from him only rarely.

He spent the last part of his life in Denmark.

The Nobel Committee, writing in 2026, described him only as mysteriously

absent before his death.

This film will not try to reconstruct his private life beyond what is needed

to understand the book.

What she made was a book, by hand, as an epitaph.

On the left-hand pages, she put the Latin text of a single poem by Catullus,

taken apart one word at a time.

Each word came with its dictionary entry, a kind of definition a student

looks up while translating.

On the right-hand pages, she put fragments of her brother's life,

photographs, pieces of his letters, paint, and her own short passages of

prose.

The poem was Catullus' elegy for his own brother, No. 101, the one she had

first met in high school Latin and had been trying to translate ever since.

In Leonard Smith's prose translation of 1894, it begins, Through many a folk

and through many waters born, I am come, brother, to thy sad grave, that I

may give the last gifts to the dead.

and may vainly speak to thy mute ashes.

Catalyst had traveled to the far side of the Aegean to stand at a grave near

Troy.

Her brother had died in another country, too.

In the pair's review, she explained exactly how she joined the two.

Where the dictionary entry for a Latin word did not match the memory on the

facing page, she said she changed the entry.

smuggling in material so that the left side and the right side would fit.

She described other choices just as plainly.

The fronts of most family photographs, she said, looked banal to her, but the

backgrounds were full of content.

So she cut out the backgrounds, especially where shadows of the people

in front fell into the space behind them.

and to give the Latin pages the look of an old Roman poem, she soaked them in

tea.

Did making it help her understand him?

No, she told the Paris Review.

She had decided that understanding is not what grief is about.

A lament, in her account, is about making something beautiful out of the

chaos left behind when someone dies.

For her, that meant making an object that is exciting and beautiful to look

at.

For about a decade, the book existed as a single handmade object.

Then her husband and collaborator, Robert Curry, worked out how it could be

published.

She has credited him in public conversations with finding the way to

reproduce it.

In 2010, New Directions published it as Knox, the Latin word for night.

Knox is a box.

Inside it is a single sheet of paper, folded like an accordion.

which opens out page by page into a reproduction of the handmade book, with

its photographs, collage, and torn letters.

It has no page numbers.

The Nobel Committee called it an epitaph in the form of a box, containing an

accordion fold-out of pictures, letters, and other texts, and described it as an

unforgettable work.

The reviews took it seriously as both a book and an object.

It was reviewed in the New Yorker.

In the London Review of Books, the poet and critic Stephanie Burt titled her

review Professor or Pinhead, after the two nicknames by which, as Carson

herself has said in readings, her brother used to tease her.

Knox was a finalist, by the published record, for the National Book Critics

Circle Award.

The years around Knox were also busy ones for her as a teacher and a

translator.

In 2003, she had moved to the University of Michigan, where she taught classics,

comparative literature, and English for six years.

In 2005, she was appointed a member of the Order of Canada.

That same year, Knopf published Decreation, which mixes poems, essays,

and the text of an opera.

The title is a word used by the French philosopher Simone Weil, who died in

1943.

The book brings together three women who, in Carson's reading, tried to get

out of their own selves.

Thafo, the medieval French mystic Marguerite Perrette, and Vey.

Perrette was burned in Paris in 1310 for her book The Mirror of Simple Souls.

Carson had already turned that story into an opera installation, which was

performed, according to the Nobel Committee's bibliography, in San

Francisco, New York, Toronto, and Ann Arbor.

In Decreation, she came back to Sappho too, and to the famous fragment about

the body on fire, reading its broken last line in a new spiritual way.

She told the Paris Review that her habit of moving between so many forms, poetry,

essays, opera, scholarship, and teaching, was not a way of expressing a

self.

It was more like the opposite.

a way of avoiding being captured in one persona by doing a lot of different

things.

The Greek tragedies kept coming.

In 2006, New York Review Books published Grief Lessons, her versions of four

plays by Euripides, Heracles, Hecuba, Hippolytus, and

Alcestis.

In 2007, she spent time as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

In 2009, Faber published An Oresteia, which put three plays about one family

side by side, by three different playwrights.

The family was the House of Atreus.

Aeschylus' Agamemnon shows the king murdered on his return from Troy.

Sophocles' Electra shows his daughter waiting for revenge.

Euripides' Orestes shows his son after the killing, half-mad.

In March and April 2009, the Classic Stage Company in New York staged the

plays, and in 2010, the book won the Penn Award for Poetry and Translation.

She was also performing.

On the 26th of March 2008, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, she and her

collaborators performed Cassandra Float Can, and a work subtitled A Lecture on

Pronouns in the Form of Fifteen Sonnets.

with voices, dancers, and projected video.

The Nobel Committee's bibliography lists a recording of her readings at the Y,

issued in 2009.

The lecture had become a performance.

In 2009, she joined New York University as a distinguished poet-in-residence in

its creative writing program.

By published accounts, she and Curry went on to teach a class there on

collaboration.

and among the students in the program in those years was the poet and artist

Bianca Stone.

By 2010, she had published A Box for a Brother, A Book of Mystics, and three

volumes of Greek Tragedy.

Her next project with Stone and Curry would take a play by Sophocles, cut it,

draw it, and letter it by hand.

Chapter 7.

On Stage

2011 to 2021.

In May 2015, according to a news agency photograph from that evening, Anne

Carson performed at the Moderna Musee, the modern art museum in Stockholm.

She was performing a version of a play first staged in Athens around two and a

half thousand years earlier.

The play was Sophocles' Antigone.

Her version of it was called Antigonach.

Eleven years later, The Swedish Academy in the same city would give her the

Nobel Prize.

How does a translator end up performing her translations in an art museum?

By the time of that evening in Stockholm, Carson's work no longer lived

only on the page.

It had become drawing, lettering, theater, opera, and performance,

much of it made with other artists.

This chapter follows that turn.

From a hand-drawn Antigone,

to a Marilyn Monroe who was also Helen of Troy.

Antigonach came first as a book in 2012 from New Directions.

Its credits list three makers.

Sophocles' play, translated by Carson, illustrated by Bianca Stone, designed by

Robert Curry.

The text was lettered by hand.

Stone's drawings were printed on separate sheets of translucent vellum.

laid over the pages so that the pictures and the words shift against each other

as you turn them.

She has said, at a University of Michigan event in 2015, that she first

imagined it as a comic book, until she worked out how many thousands of

drawings that would take.

The result was something stranger.

Inside the play, figures from much later centuries break in.

The characters quote or argue with the philosopher Hegel.

the playwrights Brecht and Beckett, and the novelist Virginia Woolf.

The story underneath is one of the oldest in European drama.

After a civil war in Thebes, two brothers have killed each other.

The new king, Creon, orders that one of them be left unburied as a traitor.

Their sister, Antigone, defies the order and buries him, and Creon condemns her

to death.

It is a play about a sister?

A Dead Brother and the Duty Ode to the Dead.

The reviews divided, as reviews of her work often did.

The critic George Steiner, reviewing it in the Times Literary Supplement,

attacked what he called its populist witticisms and the intrusions of Hegel

and Brecht, while still finding a new spirit in it.

Other reviewers were warmer, and Tigenik also became a performance piece.

and that is the form in which it reached the Moderna Musee in Stockholm.

She was also teaching in new places.

From 2010 to 2016, she held an Andrew D. White professorship at large at Cornell

University.

In 2013, she was a visiting poet at Stanford.

In 2012, the University of Toronto, where she had taken all three of her

degrees, gave her an honorary doctorate.

In 2013 came Red Doc, her return to the characters of Autobiography of Red.

Geryon is now middle-aged.

Heracles is a damaged veteran of war.

The judges of the Griffin Poetry Prize, which gave the book its award in 2014,

wrote that it stands on its own while drawing on the fragments of Stasichorus.

With that prize, she became the first writer to win the Griffin's Canadian

Prize twice.

In 2014, she published The Albertine Workout, a sequence of numbered

paragraphs about a single character in Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost

Time.

The young woman the narrator loves and tries to possess.

The same year, the University of Chicago Press published her translation of

Euripides' Iphigenia Among the Taurians.

In 2015 came a larger international commission.

That year, at Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, the Belgian director Ivo

van Hoy opened a new production of Sophocles' Antigone in a new translation

by Carson, with the French actor Juliette Binoche in the title role.

From Luxembourg, it toured to the Barbican in London, to the Brooklyn

Academy of Music in New York, and to the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.

The translation was new, not Antigonic.

Carson said at the Michigan event that Van Hove had read Antigonic, did not

want it, and asked for a fresh version, which at first made her angry.

She described the difference with an image.

The earlier book was a photograph of an apple tree from one angle.

The new version took hold of the tree and tried to shake every apple down.

A book about the production, Antigone Undone, by the writer Will Aitken,

followed in 2018.

The critics were kinder to her words than to the staging.

The London site The Arts Desk called the translation marvelous, while finding

Binoche's performance uneven.

The Hollywood Reporter, reviewing the New York run, found the production

thoughtful and measured, but dull.

That year, 2015,

she published Bokai, her version of Euripides' play about the god Dionysus,

which the Almeida Theatre in London staged that summer, with Ben Whishaw as

Dionysus.

In 2016 came Float, from Knopf, which the Nobel Committee described as a work

of 22 chapbooks, separate small booklets, which can be read in any

order.

The reader chooses the shape of the book.

One of the pieces in Float, Uncle Falling, sets memories of her father

beside memories of a great-uncle on his side of the family.

In public readings, she has described the great-uncle as a deaf man who lived

alone in the woods of northern Ontario with a dog and two horses, and who, as

she tells it, spoke only a handful of sentences in his life.

She kept writing for the stage.

In 2018, she wrote the libretto for The Mile-Long Opera, a biography of Seven O

'Clock, with spoken text by the poet Claudia Rankine and music by the

composer David Lang, directed by Elizabeth Diller and Lindsay Peisinger.

It was performed along the High Line in New York in October 2018.

The following year brought her most unusual version of a Greek play.

Norma Jean Baker of Troy, published in London in 2019, is a version of

Euripides' Helen, in which the story of Marilyn Monroe is laid over the story of

Helen of Troy.

It was commissioned for the opening season of The Shed, a new arts center in

New York in April 2019.

It starred the actor Ben Whishaw.

and the soprano Renee Fleming, and was directed by Katie Mitchell.

Euripides' Helen, first staged in 412 B.C., develops a tradition linked to

Stesichorus' recantation, in which Helen never reached Troy.

In Euripides' version, she was carried off to Egypt, and the Greeks and Trojans

fought for ten years over a phantom made of cloud.

Norma Jean Baker of Troy won Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for

English Language Poetry for 2020.

Because of the pandemic, the winners were announced in June 2021.

In 2020, she also received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in

Spain.

Its foundation described her, in the opinion of critics, as one of the most

exquisite and erudite writers of contemporary literature.

the author of a hybrid of Greek and Latin, medieval and contemporary

poetics.

In 2021, PEN America gave her the PEN Nabokov Award for Achievement in

International Literature.

CBC reported that the judges called her a visionary, sui generis writer, and

announced the honor in the form of a poem.

In the same year, she published H of H Playbook, a version of Euripides'

Heracles.

and a comic book version of Euripides' The Trojan Women, drawn by the artist

Rosanna Bruno.

By the start of the new decade, Carson was in her 70s, with a body of work that

ran from scholarship to opera.

By then, she and Robert Currie were also spending time far to the north, in

Iceland, an island of wind, lava fields, and very few trees.

Chapter 8.

How She Works

2010-2025 On an evening in March 2024, in a hall in central London,

Anne Carson came on stage with the actor Ben Whishaw, the director Simon

McBurney, and her husband, Robert Currie, to launch a new book.

A recording of the evening shows the four of them reading and talking across

the stage.

At one point on the recording, McBurney tells the audience that Carson had

scripted the whole evening.

banter included.

How does a writer who distrusts the spotlight end up writing a script for

her own book launch?

From about 2010 onward, many of her public appearances became composed works

in their own right.

This chapter draws on recordings of those events and on her published

interviews.

This chapter follows her method as far as she has described it.

She has spoken more than once about her unease at standing alone in a spotlight.

In a long-filmed conversation for the Louisiana Channel, she said that the

usual author's reading seemed to her an inadequate way to spend an evening.

So the readings changed.

In one piece recorded for the Louisiana Channel, Curry stacked cardboard boxes

while she read.

Other voices joined her.

Sometimes dancers or a chorus appeared.

The lecture itself became a form of theater.

In the same conversation, she described the difference between her and Curry in

one image.

She thinks of reality, she said, as a sentence, as words on a page.

He thinks of it as a sculpture.

Many of their joint pieces sit somewhere between the two.

In some performances, recordings show, they have ended with Yoko Ono's voice

piece for soprano.

from 1961, with the whole audience screaming for a few seconds.

The lectures she gives are written as carefully as her books.

In New York, in a recording from the City University in 2018, she gives a

lecture on corners, which moves from corners and rooms to the playwright

Harold Pinter, the poets Holderlin and John Clare, and the light artist James

Turrell.

For the Louisiana Channel, she recorded a lecture on the history of skywriting,

spoken in the voice of the sky itself, and built on the seven days of creation.

At the University of Toronto, where she was the Northrop Frye professor at the

Center for Comparative Literature in 2020, she gave a lecture called

Stillness, about works such as Robert Rauschenberg's erased de Kooning

drawing.

a drawing by another artist that Rauschenberg rubbed out.

At the Prado Museum in Madrid, in October 2023, she spoke about

hesitation, starting from Goya's painting known as The Dog, a small head

peering over a slope of empty color.

Catullus never left her.

At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2023, she gave a talk called A Russell

of Catullus.

setting the Roman poet beside the painter Cy Twombly, who scrawled lines

of ancient poetry across his canvases.

Much earlier, in a lecture recorded in New York in 2010, she traced the idea of

selling and selling out, from Odysseus and Homer to Alberto Moravia's novel

Contempt and Jean-Luc Godard's film of it.

What do these pieces have in common?

She has described a working habit that explains a lot.

In a conversation recorded for the Lannan Foundation, she said that she

likes to take a handful of unrelated things, five books, five words, five

tasks, and try to make her mind move between them.

The thinking, in her account, happens in the connections.

It echoes what she told the Paris Review in the interview published in 2004.

When she said she tracked the shapes of ideas like a hound.

She has also said more than once that she cannot make things up.

In the Louisiana conversation, she put it plainly. She writes about what has

actually happened.

If she stubs her toe on the way to the bathroom, she said she can write about

that because it is real.

She has said, too, that she tries every time not to write about herself.

and that in the end, there is no other story to tell than the one you have

lived.

In a short filmed interview for the Louisiana Channel, she said that the

task of a writer is to notice small things.

Large things, she added, are for people like Descartes.

Translation for her is slow work, at the level of the single word.

In a public conversation at the University of Michigan in 2015, she said

that she looks up every Greek word in the dictionary and reads the whole

entry, and that she chooses her English largely by rhythm.

In her readings from Knox, she has compared translation to groping around a

dark room for the light switch.

Her teaching, by her own description, has run alongside all of this for

decades.

She has called herself Riley.

a professor all her life, and called the instinct to lecture, to insist on a

truth, tedious.

Her advice to students on beginnings and endings at the Prado was a sentence from

Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons about acting so that there is no use in a

center.

In 2024, New Directions published Wrong Norma, a collection of pieces in prose

and verse, some of them laid out like a scrapbook.

At the London launch, she said the title came partly from being so often wrong,

and partly from the fact that the pieces had not been written to fit together.

In October 2024, it was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry

in the United States.

According to the National Book Critics Circle, it later won that body's Poetry

Award.

At the finalist's reading in New York, she read a Sestina called Poverty Remix

about Poverty and Scapegoating, which draws on the ancient Greek poet

Hipponax.

She kept collaborating, sometimes far from poetry.

In 2025, she appeared on The Great Lakes Suite, an album by the Canadian rock

band Reostatics, reading spoken word pieces about the lakes, much of it about

water and swimming.

The band's Kevin Hearn, speaking to CBC after the Nobel announcement, called her

very quiet, wise, strong, always observing.

Honors of an older kind arrived as well.

According to the published record, she was elected an International Writer of

the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

And in 2023, she became Honorary President of the Classical Association.

the British Society for the Study of the Ancient World.

CBC reported that in 2025, she gave the Fagles Lecture at Princeton, the

university where she had taught in the 1980s.

Readers have tried for decades to sum up the effect of her work.

Introducing her at a reading at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in

2011, the host quoted the critic Dylan Hicks' joke that her readers fall into

two groups.

those who have not read her yet, and those who think she is a genius.

The same introduction quoted Eric Lorberer, the editor of the literary

magazine Rain Taxi, calling her one of the greatest poets writing in the

English language.

Younger writers have said the same in their own ways.

The poet Jinjin Su told CBC that she chose to study at New York University

because she wanted so badly to learn from Carson.

and that her work had changed everything she knew about writing.

According to published accounts, the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong is among

the writers who have praised Autobiography of Red.

In the autumn of 2026, she was 76, dividing her time between Iceland and

Michigan, and publishing and performing with Curry.

On the 8th of October, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm tried to reach her.

Chapter 9.

Start in the Middle.

2026.

On Thursday, the 8th of October, 2026, in Stockholm,

Ingrid Carlberg, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, announced the

Nobel Prize in Literature.

It was awarded, she said, to the Canadian author Anne Carson, for her

bold and inventive oeuvre.

that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new

forms for contemporary literature.

The prize was worth 12 million Swedish kronor, about 1.2 million United States

dollars at the time.

How had the Academy reached her?

Not easily.

Carl Berg told reporters that there had not been much time to talk.

All Carson had time to say Carlberg reported, was that she was in Iceland,

listening to the wind.

She had been taken by surprise, Carlberg said, but was very happy, and she could

hear it in her voice.

Carson's own account of the morning, in a telephone interview recorded shortly

after the announcement, is plainer still.

She was sitting in the kitchen of her home in Reykjavik, which looks out on

the sea.

She was eating crackers.

drinking tea, and reading the London Review of Books.

And she had just got up to sweep the floor, because it needed sweeping.

The phone kept ringing.

She kept turning it off, because, she said, she always does.

Robert Curry, her husband, answered it.

On the recording, he can be heard explaining that he was the one who made

her call back.

When the interviewer asked whether she had expected it, Carson asked, Who would

expect such a thing?

When she was asked what she would do with the prize, she said they were

already thinking of ways to give the money away.

To a friend who needed a house, and, as they always did, to doctors without

borders.

And how would she celebrate?

They would go out for a walk in the woods, she said, so that they did not

have to answer the phone.

And then they would listen to the quiet.

It was, she said, just a normal day.

The interviewer asked how she would describe her work to someone who did not

know it.

Inadvertent, she said.

She was always trying to do something else.

Asked about boredom, she said that avoiding it was simply her test for what

to do next in the day, whether sweeping the floor or reading Homer.

Life is boring, she said.

Do something with it.

And where should a new reader begin?

Anywhere, she said, though most people start with Autobiography of Red.

Then she gave the advice she gave three times in that short call, to readers, to

young writers, and about her own way of working.

Start in the middle.

It's the only rule I have.

The choice was not a complete surprise.

In the days before the announcement, some bookmakers had listed her among the

favorites, though the odds varied from one to another.

The committee's chair, the critic Anders Olsson, explained what it saw in her in

the essay published with the announcement.

Almost all her literary production, he wrote, has centered upon the

intersection between the philologist's obsession with words and the poet's

desire for new meaning.

She had identified the etymology of words, he noted, as the starting point

for all her work.

Her translations from classical Greek, in the committee's judgment, could be

regarded as independent works in their own right.

Olsen's essay moved through the books in order.

Eros the Bittersweet, which he said laid the foundation for everything after it.

The Glass Essay, as an example of the long poem where genre boundaries blur.

Autobiography of Red, often heralded as her greatest work.

The Beauty of the Husband.

with its keats.

Knox, an epitaph in the form of a box.

Float, a book of loose chapbooks to be read in any order.

Wrong Norma.

He ended on her collaborations.

Her collaborations with visual artists, with choreographers, and with opera and

theater directors, he wrote, demonstrate the freedom with which she relates to

literary expectations and rule systems.

That freedom, in the committee's view, lay behind the importance of her work

for the international art and literature scene since the 1990s.

Steve Sem Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Committee, put it more bluntly in

an interview released the same day.

He said that nobody writes like her, and that nobody else would even, as he put

it, dare to do this in this way.

He suggested that new readers begin with Autobiography of Red.

And he described her as a writer who connects our own ways of living to

antiquity, translating Sophocles and Euripides in a very free way.

Canada answered within hours.

The Prime Minister, Mark Carney, wrote on social media that she had reimagined

the classics with wit, imagination, and a style entirely her own.

The University of Toronto, where she had taken her three degrees, called it a

very proud moment for its alumni and for the whole university.

Her literary agent, Nicola Raggi, in a statement to the New York Times, called

her a writer of the great fires, of love, fury, and grief, but also of

everyday life.

For Canadian literature, the prize had a particular weight.

By CBC's count, she was only the third writer born in Canada to win the Nobel

Prize in Literature, after the novelist Saul Bellow, who was born in Quebec and

won in 1976, and the short story writer Alice Munro, who won in 2013.

By the Nobel Prize's own count, she was the 19th woman among the 123 people

awarded the prize from 1901 to 2026.

None of that changed the way she spoke about it.

She had always been, as CBC put it on the day, a writer famous for keeping out

of the public spotlight.

Her readings were often staged so that she did not stand alone in a light.

On the morning of the prize, she swept the floor.

So let us go back to the questions we started with.

How did a banker's daughter from small-town Ontario come to Greek?

Because a Latin teacher in Port Hope offered a student a language no one else

had asked for over the lunch hour, and the student read Sappho with her.

Why turn a red-winged monster from a Greek poem into a teenage boy?

Because she found a vulnerable human figure in the surviving fragments of

Stesichorus and made that ancient story the starting point.

for a new work about desire and heartbreak.

Why print a translation full of empty brackets?

Because most of Sappho survives only in fragments, preserved in quotations by

later writers and on damaged papyri.

And Carson chose to make the gaps visible.

Why gather the fragments of her brother's life into a box?

Because a 2,000-year-old elegy by Catullus for his own brother gave her a

form for a brother who, in her own words, had been a mystery to her.

And the new forms the Academy spoke of, they are all of these together.

A scholarly essay that reads like a poem.

A novel in verse with footnotes.

A translation that shows its holes.

An epitaph in a box.

A lecture that is also a play.

A book of loose pages that you may read in any order.

She has never settled on one form for long.

She has said she is always trying to do something else.

In many surviving scraps of Sappho, the words run up to a broken edge and stop.

And Carson has spent her life working at that edge.

Between what an ancient text preserves and what has been lost.

Between scholarship and poetry.

Between a Greek root and an English branch.

Her advice for anyone coming to her work for the first time is the same as her

advice for writing it.

Start in the middle.

Thank you for spending this time with Ann Carson.

If you would like more complete stories like this one about the writers, the

thinkers, and the ideas that shaped our world, subscribe.

And we will see you in the next one.