Please don’t be among those who think that the public’s recent infatuation with Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film, The Odyssey, has anything to do with Canadian classicist, poet, and literary genre disrupter Anne Carson winning the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. That’s not how Nobel Prizes get handed out. Every October, the prizes established by Alfred Nobel—the famous inventor of dynamite—are announced with much fanfare, with those for peace and literature usually building the tallest headlines. While there is usually controversy over the peace prize selection, for the literature prize, the reaction is more often: Who?
As a long-time observer of world literature and the Nobel Committee’s annual weigh-in, Anne Carson’s selection is welcome and not a surprise. Since 1986, when her first book Eros the Bittersweet was published, Carson has entertained, beguiled, and confronted with poetic essays, essayist poetry, and classical re-imaginings, while also translating and teaching ancient Greek at McGill and Princeton Universities. Since sales and broad public acclaim are explicitly excluded from the criteria of literature laureates, and given what actually does matter to the Swedish Academy, Carson’s selection does not stand out from recent winners. However, it does represent the continuing evolution of those criteria and the Committee’s developing notions about genre and about literature itself.
Bob Dylan’s surprising win in 2016 brought the selection process into focus and generated a fruitful debate on the question of what literature is, since Dylan, who has actually written two books, is mostly known for his significant accomplishments in the art of the popular song. According to the Committee, Dylan was chosen “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” All laureates get a pithy statement of justification, and Carson’s was, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
An excellent example of this is Anne Carson’s spoken and sung performance piece Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019) that juxtaposes the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy. The work, which won the Governor General’s Award for English Language Poetry—roughly Canada’s Pulitzer—is based on Helen, the ancient Greek play by Euripides, which flips the story of the infamous queen by telling it from her point of view. Spoken by actor Ben Whishaw and sung by opera star Renée Fleming, the piece’s boldness follows Carson’s common practice of using the literature of the ancients to illuminate our time. Timelessness combined with currency is one of the Committee’s standing principles.
This is best described in the official criteria “in an ideal direction”, which has evolved to mean universality, political integrity, and humanitarian impact. Besides that, the nominee must be alive, may be of any nationality, and must be judged on the entirety of their work, which should be substantial. Their work must also demonstrate masterful craft with a highly developed and unique voice. Furthermore, the work must feature obvious and significant innovation.
Besides the striking example above, Anne Carson’s work is a continuous mashup of genres that engages in a lively dialogue across time from the ancients to contemporaries. In her rich and highly entertaining Men in the Off Hours (2000), she begins with an essay comparing the relative conceptions of time of the ancient Greek chronicler of the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides, and the modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, an early innovator in stream-of-consciousness narration. Later she builds a poem with quotations from correspondence between Emily Dickinson and the abolitionist and early supporter of women’s rights Thomas Higginson.
There follows a series of more conventional poems, including responses to several of Edward Hopper’s paintings starting with the famous Nighthawks. Later, in “Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of the Peloponnesian War”, Carson narrates an imaginary dialogue on an imaginary film set. Wildly varied, the work is focused through explorations of time, love, and sexual politics using the extended metaphor of the male gaze in the form of the film camera. She also highlights the different realities created by different genres like history, paintings, and film, including an updating of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, representing the Greek philosopher’s shadows as television.
The Nobel Prize process begins with nomination forms sent to a body of eligible nominators. From 200 or so names, the list is whittled down to between 15 and 50 before five finalists emerge. These names then go to the whole Nobel Academy, a group of 18 scholars, who read all of the authors’ canons and decide on the winner. The entire process is highly secretive, and the shortlist is kept under wraps for 50 years. So we now know who was nominated from 1976 back to the first winner in 1901, French poet Sully Prudhomme, who won “in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect.”
A fun activity for Nobel Prize watchers is to point out the seemingly glaring omissions over the years, of which here is a highly subjective list of examples: Mark Twain, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Hardy. Interestingly, Anne Carson spends a lot of her poetic space, characteristically unrhymed and unmetered, with Woolf and with Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, whom she calls by his Russian name in her poem “Lev”. Both of these writers are controversially non-winners.
Carson also writes about the remarkable life of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who was nominated in 1966. The following year, Akhmatova was nominated again, but her death disqualified her. In Carson’s tribute to her late brother Michael, who died in 2000 while the siblings were estranged, much to her regret, she quotes the Chinese dissident poet Bei Dao. Since Bei is still alive and since Carson is now a Nobel winner and thus eligible to nominate, perhaps we will be seeing his name on the honour roll soon.
“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet” is the striking opening of Carson’s novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998). True to her MO, it draws on the ancient Greek writer Stesichoros, who retold an old story about a red-coloured winged monster, Geryon, killed by the hero Heracles so he could steal his herd of red cattle. Always drawn to the unrepresented and to the path not chosen, Carson points out that Stesichoros tells the story from the “monster’s” point of view. After a series of appendices—placed at the front rather than where they usually go—Carson updates the story, depicting Geryon as a misunderstood artist and sexual abuse survivor.
Back in 650 BCE, documentary and fiction were much closer together—another ancient characteristic that Carson mirrors—and Stesichoros was supposedly blinded for insulting Helen by calling her a whore and then somehow unblinded when he recanted and praised the legendary beauty. Seizing on this, Carson creates an either/or flowchart to try to get to the bottom of this odd story. Suggesting that we just ask Helen, she writes: “If we call Helen up, either she will sit with her glass of vermouth and let it ring, or she will answer.”
After the “novel” is finished, Carson appends a hilarious mock “artist interview” between I: interviewer and S: Stesichoros, drawing perhaps on the many such encounters she must have endured.
I: How about your little hero Geryon
S: Exactly there is red that I like and there is a link between geology and character
I: What is that link
S: I have often wondered
I: Identity memory eternity your constant themes
To this, Stesichoros replies with a non sequitur. Interestingly, these are themes generally ascribed to Anne Carson.
While not an official criterion, the Nobel Committee’s choices over the years certainly include a strong element of the eternal, including Carson. Here are some very subjective examples that each brought a smile to my lips when their recognition was announced. Kazuo Ishiguro (2017) “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”; Alice Munro (2013) “master of the contemporary short story”; and Toni Morrison, “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” As diverse as these artists are, they share key, shall I say, Nobel, characteristics.
The Committee’s continuing search for the eternal has identified another excellent model. Anne Carson bridges the gulf between Homer and Gertrude Stein, yet another Nobel nominee, while ignoring, subverting, and toying with everyday genre expectations. Her Nobel Prize lays down a marker, as does that of the folk singer from Hibbing, Minnesota. Keep in mind that Homer, if he existed at all, would have sung his (or her) stories of Odysseus, and Dylan’s lyrics are brim with references to literary eternals like the Bible, Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman, among a host of others.
In the highly unlikely event that I could interview either of them, the question I would ask Dylan or Carson, since they are now eligible to nominate, is: Who will or who have you nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature? Never mind, I don’t think they are allowed to tell me.