Where to start with: Anne Carson

From essays on sexual jealousy to retellings of classical Greek tragedies, here’s a guide to the Nobel prize-winning writer’s catalogue of work ‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Nobel winner Anne Carson Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026 Anne Carson, the Canadian poet who has been awarded this year’s Nobel prize in literature, is an exhilarating choice by the committee. The sheer range of writing she has been producing since the mid-1980s is exceptional: poetry, essays, translations, collaborative artwork, and works that find intriguingly under-explored meeting points between scholarship, graphic design and personal rites of passage. But open any of these books and most of all it’s the extraordinary tone that strikes you. Carson sounds like nobody else. All her writing has a kind of high austerity. Almost jaunty in its intellectual cut and thrust, it deals with sometimes painful material without sentiment, sometimes even through literal deletions in the printed text. The result is a compression and intensity that is unputdownable. Fiona Sampson’s WaterTango Against Extinction is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Continue reading...