In a 2004 interview with The Paris Review, Anne Carson offered a simple explanation for why she writes: “I write to find out what I think about something.”Poet, classicist, essayist and translator for more than four decades, the 76-year-old has used the past to clarify her thoughts about the contemporary. She has drawn on the literature of ancient Greece while refusing to be confined by forms, by the boundaries between poetry, fiction, criticism and memoir. This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature acknowledges her “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.Greek on the menuBorn in Toronto in June 1950, the second child of a banker father and homemaker mother, Carson’s childhood was spent between small towns, including Stoney Creek, Port Hope and Timmins. The itinerant childhood meant changing schools repeatedly, but it also brought the Canadian writer to the teacher who would alter the course of her life.Explained | What makes Anne Carson, the 2026 Nobel Prize winner, so different?In a 2011 interview to the literary magazine Brick, Carson spoke of how she owed her “career and happiness” to her Latin teacher Alice Cowan in Port Hope High School. It was the time she fancied herself as a “reborn” Oscar Wilde: “…I thought, If I learn Greek I could be all the more like Oscar Wilde. It seemed the natural next step.” And so, over Greek lessons during lunch hour, a lifelong bond with the ancient classics was formed. Carson went on to study Classics at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 1981, was on Sappho, the ancient Greek poet.Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, published in 1986, grew out of her academic work, an examination of desire through the classical lens. It established an idea that would remain central to her writing: that desire is created by distance, shaped by longing and imagination. “The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between,” she wrote.Books that changed the rulesIf Eros the Bittersweet introduced Carson as a provocateur, Autobiography of Red (1998), a novel in verse, established her as an unmistakably original literary voice. Carson transformed the ancient Greek myth of Geryon, the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, into the story of a sensitive adolescent who falls in love with Herakles. Myth, adolescence, sexuality and heartbreak come together into a moving coming-of-age tale.Then came The Beauty of the Husband (2001), “a fictional essay in 29 tangos”, which made her the first woman to win the TS Eliot Prize; Red Doc> (2013), which returned to the characters of Autobiography of Red; and Nox (2010), perhaps her most formally startling book.Story continues below this adNox was created after the death of Carson’s estranged brother Michael and combines photographs, letters, translation, fragments and handwritten material in an accordion-fold format. Its emotional subject is grief, but it also examines the intellectual difficulty of holding on to another person through language.Carson has also translated Sappho, Euripides and other classical writers, most notably in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and An Oresteia. Wrong Norma (2024), a collection of 25 poetic-prose pieces, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2025.What makes her stand outCarson’s distinction lies in her easy ability to transcend genres. She’s always been reluctant to call herself a poet, even though, as she told The Paris Review in the 2004 interview, she had been writing “some heretic form of poetry” for much of her life.She is impatient with formal categories, with the distinction between the intellectual and the emotional. A poem can suddenly become an essay; an essay morphs into a translation; a translation can become autobiography; an ancient myth turns into a modern love story.Story continues below this adThrough it all Carson maintains an emotional detachment, writing about desire, abandonment or bereavement without the confessional warmth usually associated with such themes.Instead, they show up through a fragment of Sappho, in the form of a mythological figure, a photograph, or an abrupt change of form, demonstrating that the classics remain radically contemporary, that there is no one way to arrive at or dwell in poetry. Or, as she put it in Autobiography of Red: “Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”