Anne Patricia Carson (born June 21, 1950) is a Canadian academic and writer. Born in Toronto, she graduated from the University of Toronto and starting in 1979 became a professor of classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at several universities. She has taught at the University of Calgary, McGill University, University of Michigan, New York University, and Princeton University. Carson has written more than twenty books, including collections of essays and poetry, as well as translations of ancient Greek tragedies.
She has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters. She was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Contents
Biography
Early life and education
Anne Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950. Her father was a banker and she grew up in a number of small Canadian towns. In high school, a Latin instructor introduced Carson to the world and language of Ancient Greece and tutored her privately.
Enrolling at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, she left twice—at the end of her first and second years. Carson, disconcerted by curricular constraints (particularly by a required course on Milton), retired to the world of graphic arts for a short time. She did eventually return to the University of Toronto, where she completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974, her Master of Arts in classics in 1975, and her Ph.D. in classics in 1981. She also spent a year studying Greek metrics and Greek textual criticism at the University of St Andrews.
Career in academia
Carson began her Classics teaching career at the University of Calgary in 1979, before completing her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. In 1980, she joined Princeton University, where she taught as instructor, and later assistant professor. She also taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York during her time there as a Rockefeller Scholar in Residence (1986–1987). Having been denied tenure, Carson left Princeton in 1987 to teach classical languages and literature at Emory University in Atlanta for a year, before moving to Montreal to join McGill University as Director of Graduate Studies in Classics.
In the late 1990s, Carson's teaching career hit a hurdle when McGill cancelled all graduate courses in ancient Greek, closed its Classics Department, and moved all remaining Classics courses to its History Department. While continuing to teach at McGill as associate professor, Carson dealt with this by spending half of each year as a guest lecturer at other institutions, including the University of Michigan (Norman Freehling Visiting Professorship, 1999–2000), the University of California, Berkeley (Spring 2000), and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (Spring 2001). She was appointed John MacNaughton Professor of Classics at McGill in 2000.
In 2003, Carson moved to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, where she served as Professor of Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, and English Language and Literature until 2009. In 2004, Carson was in contention for the Professor of Poetry post at the University of Oxford, placing second behind the eventual appointment Christopher Ricks, with around 30 nominations. She was cited as a potential contender for the four-year position again in 2009.
Carson joined the New York University (NYU) Creative Writing Program as Distinguished Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor in 2009. Together with her husband and collaborator Robert Currie, she teaches an annual class at NYU on the art of collaboration, called "Egocircus". Carson was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 2010 to 2016, and the Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University (Creative Writing Program) in 2013. She joined Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, as Visiting Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in 2014, teaching classical studies and the written arts. Carson has described her more diverse role in the latter part of her career as "a visiting [whatever]", and her decades spent teaching ancient Greek as "a total joy".
Notable honours
Carson was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2022. In May 2023, she was announced as Honorary President of the Classical Association, 2023–2024. She was awarded the international Vigdís Prize, an award conferred for outstanding contributions to world languages and cultures.
She was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature."
Literature
Writing
Trained as a classicist, and with an interest in comparative literature, anthropology, history, and the arts, Carson fuses ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernises, and translates Ancient Greek and Latin literature – writers such as Aeschylus, Catullus, Euripides, Homer, Ibycus, Mimnermus, Sappho, Simonides, Sophocles, Stesichorus, and Thucydides. She also draws on the works of more modern writers and thinkers, such as Emily Brontë, Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Gertrude Stein, Simone Weil, and Virginia Woolf. Many of her books blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction to varying degrees.
First editions of Carson's eighteen books of writings (as of 2021) have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, New Directions, and the Princeton University Press in the US, by Brick Books and McClelland & Stewart in Canada, and by Bloodaxe Books, Jonathan Cape, Oberon Books, and Sylph Editions in the UK.
In 2025, Carson appeared on The Great Lakes Suite, an album by Canadian indie rock band Rheostatics, narrating several poems inspired by the Great Lakes.
Eros the Bittersweet – Carson's first book of criticism, published in 1986 – examines eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain best exemplified by "glukupikron", a word of Sappho's creation and the "bittersweet" of the book's title. It considers how triangulations of desire appear in the writings of Sappho, ancient Greek novelists, and Plato. A reworking of her 1981 doctoral thesis Odi et Amo Ergo Sum ("I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am"), Eros the Bittersweet "laid the groundwork for her subsequent publications, […] formulating the ideas on desire that would come to dominate her poetic output", and establishing her "style of patterning her writings after classical Greek literature".
Men in the Off Hours (2000) is a hybrid collection of short poems, verse essays, epitaphs, commemorative prose, interviews, scripts, and translations from ancient Greek and Latin (of Alcman, Catullus, Sappho and others). The book broke with Carson's established pattern of writing long poems. The pieces include diverse references to writers, thinkers, and artists, as well as to historical, biblical, and mythological figures, including: Anna Akhmatova, Antigone, Antonin Artaud, John James Audubon, Augustine, Bei Dao, Catherine Deneuve, Emily Dickinson, Tamiki Hara, Hokusai, Edward Hopper, Longinus (both biblical and literary), Thucydides, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf.
Translation
Carson has published translations of ten ancient Greek tragedies – one by Aeschylus (Agamemnon), two by Sophocles (Antigone, Electra), and seven by Euripides (Alcestis, Hecuba, Herakles, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Tauris, Orestes, and The Bacchae) – as well as the poetry of Sappho in English.
First editions of Carson's seven books of translations have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the New York Review of Books, and the University of Chicago Press in the US, and by Oberon Books and the Oxford University Press in the UK.
Carson was a Rockefeller Scholar-in-Residence at the 92nd Street Y (New York City) from August 1986 to August 1987, where she worked on a translation of Sophocles' Electra. It was eventually published in 2001 and included in her 2009 book An Oresteia, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2010. Featuring Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Orestes, An Oresteia was staged in New York by the Classic Stage Company in 2009.
Carson was also an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007, where she worked on a translation of the ancient Greek play Prometheus Bound (attributed to Aeschylus), an excerpt of which was published in 2010.
In 2015, a production of Carson's Antigone directed by Ivo van Hove and starring Juliette Binoche opened at Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg in 2015 before travelling to cities in Europe and the US, including London (Barbican Centre), New York (BAM), and Paris (Théâtre de la Ville).
Personal life
Carson is known to be reticent about her private life, and discourages autobiographical readings of her writings. Information about her in publications is often limited to the phrase: "Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living." While not a confessional poet, her work is considered personal. Carson has said that in her work, she uses her life democratically as just one set of facts among others in the world.
Carson's first marriage, during which she used the surname Giacomelli, lasted eight years and ended in 1980. This union, and its aftermath, has been claimed as a source for "Kinds of Water" (collected in Plainwater), and for The Beauty of the Husband. Carson has confirmed that her first husband took her notebooks when they divorced (as happens to the protagonist in The Beauty of the Husband), though later returned them.
Carson's father Robert had Alzheimer's disease. "The Glass Essay" (collected in Glass, Irony, and God), "Very Narrow" (collected in Plainwater), and "Father's Old Blue Cardigan" (collected in Men in the Off Hours) all deal with his mental and physical decline.
Carson's mother Margaret (1913–1997) died during the writing of Men in the Off Hours. Carson closed the collection with the prose piece "Appendix to Ordinary Time", using crossed-out phrases from the diaries and manuscripts of Virginia Woolf to craft an epitaph for her. Red Doc> has been read as a second elegy for the death of her mother. Carson has described her mother as the love of her life.
Carson's brother Michael was arrested for drug dealing in 1978. Jumping bail, he fled Canada and she never saw him again. Carson dealt with the disappearance of her brother from her life in "Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother" (collected in Plainwater), which is written as a kind of memoir. In 2000, he called her and they arranged to meet in Copenhagen where he lived, but he died before they could reconnect. Nox, an epitaph Carson created for her brother in 2000 and published in 2010, has been described as her most explicitly personal work.
Carson is married to the artist Robert Currie, whom she met in Ann Arbor while teaching at the University of Michigan. She has described Currie as "my collaborator-husband person". Projects they have worked on together include book designs and performances for Nox and Antigonick. Carson also refers to Currie as "the Randomizer" during their creative process.