Anne Carson (born 1950) is a Canadian and Icelandic poet, essayist, translator, and classicist. Her writing brings ancient Greek texts and figures into contact with contemporary idiom, combining scholarship with poetry, prose, dramatic writing, and translation. She completed a BA, MA, and PhD in Classics at the University of Toronto and has taught classical studies and related subjects in North America.
Her work frequently tests the boundaries between literary forms while returning to questions of desire, myth, loss, and language. In Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse, she recasts the myth of Geryon and Herakles in a modern setting. Her wider body of work includes studies of Greek literature, translations of ancient authors, lyric essays, and visually distinctive book projects.
Carson received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000 and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005. She received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature in 2021, became an Icelandic citizen in 2022, and received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The award recognitions reflect an oeuvre that has connected classical learning with new possibilities for contemporary literature.
This profile is awaiting source review; collected books are already linked below.
