Anne Carson

Anne Carson's Backstory

Early life

Anne Carson was born on June 21, 1950, in Toronto.¹ Her father was a banker, and the family lived in a series of small Canadian towns.¹ In high school a Latin teacher agreed to teach her ancient Greek over the lunch hour, the start of her lifelong work with classical literature.² She has said that she was more drawn to drawing than to writing when she was young.²

Classics

Carson studied at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, leaving twice before completing a B.A. in 1974, an M.A. in 1975 and a Ph.D. in 1981; she also spent a year at the University of St Andrews studying Greek metrics.¹ She taught at the University of Calgary and then at Princeton from 1980 to 1987, and went on to teach Classics at McGill, the University of Michigan, New York University and Cornell, among others.¹

Books

Eros the Bittersweet was published in 1986.¹ Glass, Irony and God (1995) includes “The Glass Essay,” a long poem about the end of a love affair that draws on her reading of the Brontës.⁵ Autobiography of Red (1998) retells the myth of Geryon as a novel in verse, and its sequel, Red Doc>, followed in 2013.⁴ Her mother died in 1997, while she was writing Men in the Off Hours.¹

In 2001 The Beauty of the Husband made her the first woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize, and she won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Men in the Off Hours that year and again for Red Doc> in 2014, the first poet to win it twice.¹ Nox (2010), made after her brother died, is a folding book of photographs, letters, drawings and poems built around an elegy by Catullus.⁴ Her most recent collection, Wrong Norma (2024), was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.⁶

Translation and theater

Carson has translated Sappho (If Not, Winter, 2002), Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides.¹ The Swedish Academy said her translations from Classical Greek “may be regarded as independent works in their own right.”³ Her version of Antigone, directed by Ivo van Hove with Juliette Binoche, opened in 2015 and toured internationally.¹

The Nobel Prize

On October 8, 2026, the Swedish Academy awarded Carson the Nobel Prize in Literature.³ Anders Olsson, who chairs the Nobel Committee, described her work as joining “the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning.”⁴