art news
Anne Carson — 2026 Nobel Laureate
note
On October 8, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Canadian poet, essayist and classicist Anne Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
It all began with her dissertation. In 1981, Carson defended her doctoral thesis in Toronto under the title “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum” — “I hate and I love, therefore I am.” Here a line from the poet Catullus is fused with Descartes’ cogito. The dissertation later became Eros the Bittersweet, a book about desire that opens with the poems of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. For Carson, eros is the gap between lover and beloved, and it is precisely this gap that sets desire in motion. To anyone familiar with psychoanalysis, this sounds very Lacanian.
Carson’s celebrated novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998), grew out of the remnants of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Stesichoros about Geryon, the red winged monster slain by Herakles. Only fragments of the poem survive on papyrus, and Carson writes that they look as if the author himself had torn it to pieces and hidden them in a box. The order in which to read them depends on how the pieces fall out, so she invites the reader simply to shake the box — a purely Dadaist gesture. From these fragments Carson assembled the story of a red boy named Geryon, only now in the modern world.
And recently the British actress Gwendoline Christie — Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones — recorded Carson’s poem “Wildly Constant” (2009) for a vinyl series marking the 45th anniversary of the British literary magazine London Review of Books. The recording was made in Freud’s study at his house in Hampstead. According to the actress, surrounded by his belongings and talismans, she felt especially strongly the connection to Carson’s themes: the unconscious, memory, gender and voice.
Two of Carson’s books have so far been published in Russian: Eros the Bittersweet and Autobiography of Red. Only the first is currently freely available for purchase.
P.S. To me, awarding the prize to Carson feels like a sign of the times: in the age of AI, human literature is taking on new forms, and this is not merely a technique that can be imitated. It is rather a new way of speaking from one’s own story — something like a fingerprint that belongs to one person alone. There are many interpretations, but only one form.
It all began with her dissertation. In 1981, Carson defended her doctoral thesis in Toronto under the title “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum” — “I hate and I love, therefore I am.” Here a line from the poet Catullus is fused with Descartes’ cogito. The dissertation later became Eros the Bittersweet, a book about desire that opens with the poems of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. For Carson, eros is the gap between lover and beloved, and it is precisely this gap that sets desire in motion. To anyone familiar with psychoanalysis, this sounds very Lacanian.
Carson’s celebrated novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998), grew out of the remnants of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Stesichoros about Geryon, the red winged monster slain by Herakles. Only fragments of the poem survive on papyrus, and Carson writes that they look as if the author himself had torn it to pieces and hidden them in a box. The order in which to read them depends on how the pieces fall out, so she invites the reader simply to shake the box — a purely Dadaist gesture. From these fragments Carson assembled the story of a red boy named Geryon, only now in the modern world.
And recently the British actress Gwendoline Christie — Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones — recorded Carson’s poem “Wildly Constant” (2009) for a vinyl series marking the 45th anniversary of the British literary magazine London Review of Books. The recording was made in Freud’s study at his house in Hampstead. According to the actress, surrounded by his belongings and talismans, she felt especially strongly the connection to Carson’s themes: the unconscious, memory, gender and voice.
Two of Carson’s books have so far been published in Russian: Eros the Bittersweet and Autobiography of Red. Only the first is currently freely available for purchase.
P.S. To me, awarding the prize to Carson feels like a sign of the times: in the age of AI, human literature is taking on new forms, and this is not merely a technique that can be imitated. It is rather a new way of speaking from one’s own story — something like a fingerprint that belongs to one person alone. There are many interpretations, but only one form.