Past Princeton Professor Anne Carson Wins Literature Nobel

Anne Carson, a Canadian poet, translator, essayist, and assistant professor of classics at Princeton from 1980 to 1987, was named the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on Oct. 8.

Carson has authored more than 20 books; her most famous is the 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red, which drew from an ancient Greek poem, “Geryoneis.” She is also an essayist and is known for writing in myriad forms and modernizing ancient Greek stories. In addition to Princeton, she has taught at institutions including McGill, Michigan, Cornell, NYU, and the University of Calgary.

The Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy cited Carson’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

Carson was back at Princeton last fall, when she delivered the annual Robert Fagles Lecture for Classics in the Contemporary Arts to an audience of more than 400 and taught a session of the undergraduate humanities sequence.

She is the fourth Nobel laureate in literature with Princeton ties, joining longtime creative writing professor Toni Morrison (1993), visiting lecturer Mario Vargas Llosa (2010), and the playwright Eugene O’Neill 1910 (1936), who attended Princeton but never graduated.

Jane Alison ’83, a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, told PAW in an email that a class she took with Carson at Princeton transformed her. “What affects me most is how she brings to the modern world of letters a grand disinterest in conventional genre boundaries that are, after all, relatively new,” Alison wrote. “A fictional essay in tangos; a novel in verse with scholarly introduction and glosses; an elegy made of photos, drawings, snips of poem, and dictionary entries, all on a single long bolt of paper (like a papyrus scroll? a winding cloth?): the ancient becomes endlessly new in Anne’s hands.” 

Carson has also won a MacArthur Foundation award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and other prestigious awards. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Toronto, as well as a diploma from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she studied for a year.

Carson was in Iceland, where she now lives, when she received the news. She will be honored at a ceremony in Stockholm in December. The prize comes with a monetary award of 12 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million.