Anne Patricia Carson (born June 21, 1950) is a Canadian academic and author who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature."
Born in Toronto, she graduated from the University of Toronto and became a professor and lecturer at several universities since 1979. Throughout her career she has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing. She has taught at the University of Calgary, Princeton University, Emory University, McGill University, University of Michigan, and New York University. Carson has written more than twenty books, including collections of essays and poetry, as well as translations of ancient Greek tragedies. She has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters.
Anne Carson was born in Toronto, Canada, on June 21, 1950. Her father was a banker and she grew up in a number of small Canadian towns. In 1965, while living in Stoney Creek, Ontario, she discovered a bilingual version of Sappho's works, edited and translated by Willis Barnstone, at a Hamilton mall, which sparked her passion for Ancient Greek translation. At Bishop Ryan Catholic Secondary School, she was taught by the Latin teacher on a volunteer basis during her lunch hours.
In 1968, Carson enrolled at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, but was frustrated by the compulsory courses required for her arts degree such as a mandatory course on John Milton. She dropped out twice, at the end of her first and second years, choosing instead to work for a short time in the graphic arts. She eventually returned to the University of Toronto, where she completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974, her Master of Arts in classics in 1975, and her Ph.D. in classics in 1981. She also spent a year studying Greek metrics and textual criticism at the University of St Andrews.
Carson began her Classics teaching career at the University of Calgary in 1979, before completing her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. In 1980, she joined Princeton University, where she taught as instructor, and later assistant professor. She also taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York during her time there as a Rockefeller Scholar in Residence (1986–1987). Having been denied tenure, Carson left Princeton in 1987 to teach classical languages and literature at Emory University in Atlanta for a year, before moving to Montreal to join McGill University as Director of Graduate Studies in Classics.
In the late 1990s, Carson's teaching career hit a hurdle when McGill cancelled all graduate courses in ancient Greek, closed its Classics Department, and moved all remaining Classics courses to its History Department. While continuing to teach at McGill as associate professor, Carson dealt with this by spending half of each year as a guest lecturer at other institutions, including the University of Michigan (Norman Freehling Visiting Professorship, 1999–2000), the University of California, Berkeley (Spring 2000), and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (Spring 2001). She was appointed John MacNaughton Professor of Classics at McGill in 2000.
In 2003, Carson moved to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, where she served as Professor of Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, and English Language and Literature until 2009. In 2004, Carson was in contention for the Professor of Poetry post at the University of Oxford, placing second behind the eventual appointment Christopher Ricks, with around 30 nominations. She was cited as a potential contender for the four-year position again in 2009. In 2006, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Villa, the same year that the institution launched an ancient theatre series with the inaugural play being her translation of Euripides' Hippolytus (play).
Carson joined the New York University (NYU) Creative Writing Program as Distinguished Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor in 2009. Together with her husband and collaborator Robert Currie, she teaches an annual class at NYU on the art of collaboration, called "Egocircus". Carson was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 2010 to 2016, and the Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University (Creative Writing Program) in 2013. She joined Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, as Visiting Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in 2014, teaching classical studies and the written arts. Carson has described her more diverse role in the latter part of her career as "a visiting [whatever]", and her decades spent teaching ancient Greek as "a total joy".
Carson was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2022. In May 2023, she was announced as Honorary President of the Classical Association, 2023–2024. She was awarded the international Vigdís Prize, an award conferred for outstanding contributions to world languages and cultures.
In 2026, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the biobibliography accompanying the Nobel award, committee chair Anders Olsson described Carson's juxtaposition of classical and modern writers as central to her creation of new literary forms. He cited her pairing of Simonides with Paul Celan in Economy of the Unlost, and of Thucydides with Virginia Woolf in Men in the Off Hours. He also treated her Greek translations as literary works in their own right.
Carson is trained as a classicist and translator of Ancient Greek, but her own writing fuses ideas and themes from many fields and forms, sometimes using prose, poetry, and essay in the same work and imagining discussions between modern celebrities and figures from the ancient classics.
First editions of Carson's eighteen books of writings (as of 2021) have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, New Directions, and the Princeton University Press in the US, by Brick Books and McClelland & Stewart in Canada, and by Bloodaxe Books, Jonathan Cape, Oberon Books, and Sylph Editions in the UK.
In 2025, Carson appeared on The Great Lakes Suite, an album by Canadian indie rock band Rheostatics, narrating several poems inspired by the Great Lakes.
Eros the Bittersweet – Carson's first book of criticism, published in 1986 – examines eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain best exemplified by "glukupikron", a word of Sappho's creation and the "bittersweet" of the book's title. It considers how triangulations of desire appear in the writings of Sappho, ancient Greek novelists, and Plato. A reworking of her 1981 doctoral thesis Odi et Amo Ergo Sum ("I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am"), Eros the Bittersweet "laid the groundwork for her subsequent publications, […] formulating the ideas on desire that would come to dominate her poetic output", and establishing her "style of patterning her writings after classical Greek literature". Her poem The Glass Essay is 30 pages long.
Men in the Off Hours (2000) is a hybrid collection of short poems, verse essays, epitaphs, commemorative prose, interviews, scripts, and translations from ancient Greek and Latin (of Alcman, Catullus, Sappho and others). The book broke with Carson's established pattern of writing long poems. The pieces include diverse references to writers, thinkers, and artists, both classical and modern, as well as to historical, biblical, and mythological figures, including: Oedipus, Hector, Thucydides, Lazarus of Bethany, Augustine, John James Audubon, Emily Dickinson, Edward Hopper, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and her own recently deceased mother.
Carson delivered a series of "short talks", or short-format poems on various subjects, at the address to the University of Toronto Ph.D. graduating class of 2012. She also participated in the Bush Theatre's project Sixty Six Books in 2011, writing a piece titled "Jude: The Goat at Midnight" based on the Epistle of Jude from the King James Bible.