Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature

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Penguin Random House author Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Prize committee said they had selected her for ‘her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.’ Anne Carson is published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, a VINTAGE imprint, as well as in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India. Her most recent book, Wrong Norma, was published by Jonathan Cape, Vintage in February 2024.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her many awards and honours include the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Prize, on two occasions, fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2020.

Robin Robertson, Anne Carson’s long-term editor at Jonathan Cape said: ‘Anne Carson is a Canadian professor of Classics, a poet, essayist, librettist and translator, though none of those labels comes close to defining any of the books she has written. Resolutely sui generis, Carson is the most unclassifiable of writers: a philosopher of love and loss, restlessly jumping genres, always ambitious, radical and alert, always interrogating the world with her clean economy of language and her ranging, idiosyncratic intelligence. If I were forced by the gods to give her work a classifying label I would call it charis, the Greek word for “grace”: a reciprocal gift, a grace given and received.’

Declan Ryan, who recently took over the Cape poetry list from Robertson, added: 'Anne Carson's singular work continues to be central to Cape's poetry publishing and she remains one of the most restless, innovative and unguessable writers at work in English. Her forthcoming books, Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind (February 2027) and Highlights of Colonialism (November 2027) are further testament to how she keeps reinventing her voice and broadening the scope of what can be done in language.'

Anne Carson joins more than 80 Random House and Penguin authors who are previous recipients of a Nobel Prize.  

Her works published by Jonathan Cape and Vintage are: Float, Red Doc>, Autobiography of Red, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband, Men in the Off Hours,H of H Playbook and Wrong Norma