Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The 76-year-old Canadian poet, essayist, translator and classicist was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the news broke. The Swedish Academy praised her “bold and inventive” oeuvre for its “playful dialogue with the classical tradition”, through which she has fashioned “new forms for contemporary literature”. In books like her 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red (which has sold nearly 100,000 copies in the United States), Wrong Norma (2024), her recent poetry collection, and her 1986 debut Eros the Bittersweet – a book-length essay about the god of love – she challenges formal conventions and moves across literary genres. Carson’s own account of what language can do offers a sense of the possibilities such invention opens up:words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning. ‘The easiest difficult poet’Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson studied classics at the University of Toronto and went on to teach ancient Greek. Eros the Bittersweet grew out of her scholarly training.Carson, who divides her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan in the US, and Iceland, is famously private. But in a 2024 essay in the London Review of Books, she revealed she has Parkinson’s disease, and mourned the disintegration of her handwriting and the erosion of her long pleasure in filling “shelves and shleves” of notebooks.She has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. And she became the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize, for her collection The Beauty of the Husband, in 2001.Her work is fiercely learned, and makes no apology for it. “Almost everything she writes is about several things at once,” notes critic Lola Seaton, “and ranges associatively across the history of Western thought.”Yet that erudition sits easily alongside lyrical, direct accounts of human emotion and experience. This may help explain her appeal to readers who could otherwise find such intellectual density and avowed experimentalism forbidding – or even off-putting. The New York Times’ poetry columnist has called her “the easiest difficult poet”.In Carson’s hands, the breakdown of a marriage can become a way of testing Keats’ claim that beauty is truth. An ancient monster can grow up to be a teenager struggling with his sexuality. Marilyn Monroe can be reimagined as Helen of Troy. A short talk on Homer’s Odyssey can lead to poet John Ashbery’s thoughts on the importance of light.Where to start?For readers encountering Carson for the first time, Autobiography of Red is a good place to begin. Its reworking of an ancient myth indicates her artistic sensibility and shows how closely her scholarly interests and imaginative pursuits are intertwined. The text draws on the work of Stesichorus, an ancient Greek lyric poet whose account of the monster Geryon survives only in fragments. In the familiar heroic version of the myth, Heracles kills Geryon and makes off with his livestock. Stesichorus had already complicated that account by treating Geryon sympathetically. Carson, characteristically, takes things that little bit further, recasting the monster in a contemporary story of sexual desire and artistic discovery. Her Geryon is a red boy with wings. Growing up in an abusive household on an Atlantic island, he finds a means of expression in the medium of photography. He falls in love with Heracles, a young man whose casual approach to their relationship leaves Geryon exposed and undone. When they meet again years later, the attraction persists, as does its capacity to wound him. In this way, the mythic and heroic material she draws on is transformed into something more intimate, with consequences Geryon must learn to live with.Painful contradictions of desire recurThe painful contradictions of desire are a recurring concern in Carson’s writing. It is evident in her first published book, Eros the Bittersweet.Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time, it considers the paradox of a desire that produces pleasure while causing pain, taking Sappho’s account of eros (or passionate, sexual love and desire), as a point of departure. This is how it starts:It was Sappho who first called eros “bittersweet.” No one who has been in love disputes this. The conversational second sentence brings the ancient observation into the remit of the reader’s experience. Across Carson’s body of work, the distance between classical literature and contemporary life thoroughly, repeatedly contracts in this fashion. Old texts offer exacting accounts of feelings we might, in the first flush of emotion, take to be ours alone.Carson also reminds us these connections between literature and lived experience extend beyond the classical world. Consider her long poem about unrequited love The Glass Essay, collected in Glass, Irony and God (1995) – and cited by the Nobel committee. The poem’s speaker visits her mother after the end of a relationship, taking Emily Brontë with her in the form of a book. Reading is part of her effort to understand what has happened. The relationship between learning and loss becomes especially stark in Nox (2010), Carson’s astonishing elegy for her estranged brother, Michael, who died in 2000. Running through it is Carson’s engagement with Catullus’ poem mourning his own brother. Poet-critic Dan Chiasson explains how the book brings the limited record of Carson’s brother’s life into contact with a Latin–English lexicon keyed to ancient Roman poet Catullus’ elegy. Chiasson also draws attention to a difficulty at the centre of Nox: accumulated material does not produce a clearer understanding of the person being mourned.Carson acknowledges this at the start of the book:I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think. He’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it.That tension helps explain the book’s deeply thoughtful method of assemblage. Nox needs to be seen – and ideally, held – to be properly appreciated. Published as an accordion-folded book in a box, it reproduces a handmade assortment of photographs and fragmentary scraps of text.Archival documentation can be preserved and examined, but cannot answer every question Carson might have asked of her brother. The form of the thing allows evidence and uncertainty to sit side by side, encouraging further reflection on the part of the reader.Breathtaking emotional forceThe gaps in Nox find a counterpart in Carson’s work as a translator. In If Not, Winter (2002), her bilingual edition of ancient Greek poet Sappho’s work, brackets and blanks mark what has been lost. The reader encounters words that have endured for centuries alongside the white space where others should be. Carson makes that incomplete transition part of the reading process. Absence acquires a visible form. Her recent collection, Wrong Norma, finds a different use for discontinuity. Its 25 entries, accompanied by images, move between subjects as far apart as the legal representation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and deepening footsteps left in snow (the latter is one of Carson’s longstanding preoccupations). Carson describes the pieces as unlinked – hence the title’s supposed wrongness. The collection gives readers no continuous narrative to follow. Each exploratory text is a point of departure: an opportunity for fresh discovery and the potential for new ways of thinking.For readers drawn to Carson in the wake of the Nobel, this willingness to depart from an expected course may take some getting used to. But it is also part of the pleasure and reward of reading her. Her writing might be grounded in the trappings of scholarly inquiry, but she consistently arrives at observations and insights whose emotional force can take the breath away. The learning matters. So does the surprise.Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.