Anne Carson, the prolific Canadian essayist, novelist and poet, was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Over a career that spans more than four decades, Carson has built an oeuvre that draws on her education in classical literature and often refracts it through a playful lens.
Her writing threads a line from Greek antiquity to the present day, and interrogates the treacly nature of desire and the pain that it induces. Carson gives the impression “of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient,” Sam Anderson wrote in a 2013 New York Times Magazine profile. “Our modern earthly categories are too artificial and simplistic to contain anything like the real truth she is determined to communicate.”
Despite Carson’s inclination toward privacy, she has achieved a kind of celebrity rare among public intellectuals, as Anderson noted. During a performance of her play “Antigonick” for an overflow crowd at N.Y.U., he wrote, the audience reached a consensus: “People kept using the phrase ‘rock concert.’”
If you’ve never read any of Carson’s works, here are five books to start with.
Autobiography of Red (1998)
A novel in verse and perhaps her most popular work, “Autobiography of Red” draws upon Carson’s obsession with Greek classics through a retelling of the fragmentary poem “Geryoneis,” by the poet Stesichorus. In the original myth, Geryon is a winged monster who is slaughtered by Heracles after stealing his cattle. Carson reimagines him in the present day as a gay teenager with a troubled family life. He falls into a state of deep infatuation with the Greek hero, who in this version is an older boy who eventually breaks his heart. “Carson writes in language any poet would kill for,” Ruth Padel wrote in her review for The New York Times, “sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted.”
Glass, Irony & God (1995)
This collection of three narrative poems contains “The Glass Essay,” a 36-page epic that interweaves the end of a romantic relationship with musings on Emily Brönte, whom Carson describes as a perpetual “whacher” — a deliberate misspelling — who constantly observes the English moors that inspired her novel “Wuthering Heights.” In Brönte, Carson finds kinship and a means of verbalizing her heartbreak. The author Anthony Doerr has referred to “The Glass Essay” as his favorite poem, writing that “it feels to me like a thousand floodlights switching on.”
Eros the Bittersweet (1986)
Her first work of literary criticism, “Eros” dissects and expands upon the Greek poet Sappho’s concept of “glukupikron,” a word that roughly translates to “sweetbitter” and encapsulates the simultaneous pain and pleasure of romantic love. Carson traces the idea of eros through the poetry of Sappho and other ancient Greek masters, before settling on her thesis of “eros as lack,” describing passionate love as a product of the thin-ridged edge between wanting something and having it.
The Beauty of the Husband (2001)
In the first chapter, Carson writes: “This imitation of a poisonous by a nonpoisonous species is called mimicry./My husband was no mimic.” She chronicles the dissolution of a marriage and her erotic fixation on the husband through 29 “tangos,” a poetic form of her invention that alternates long lines with shorter ones to evoke the rhythms of dance. Daphne Merkin wrote in her Times review, “I don’t think there has 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.”
Nox (2009)
Written after a five-year hiatus, “Nox” demonstrates Carson’s willingness to challenge what a volume of poetry should look like. Sold in a skinny, funerary box that opens to reveal pages that unfold like an accordion, “Nox” presents an elegy for her estranged brother in a scrapbook that contains photographs, illustrations and excerpts to illuminate her field of memory. Of its layout, Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times Book Review that “it carries a whiff of visual art multiple or gift shop souvenir or ‘Griffin & Sabine. But trust me: It’s an Anne Carson book. Maybe her best.”
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