AMERICAN POET WINS NOBEL FOR LITERATURE
The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to Louise Glück, one of America’s most celebrated poets, for writing “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Glück, who was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island, has written numerous poetry collections, many of which deal with the challenges of family life and growing older. They include “The Wild Iris,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” about mortality and grief, from 2014. She was named the United States’ poet laureate in 2003.
At the Nobel announcement in Stockholm, Anders Olsson, chair of the prize-giving committee, praised her minimalist voice and especially poems that get to the heart of family life.
“Louise Glück’s voice is unmistakable,” he said. “It is candid and uncompromising, and it signals this poet wants to be understood.” But he also said her voice was also “full of humor and biting wit.”
Reached at her home in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday morning, Glück said she was “completely flabbergasted that they would choose a White American lyric poet.”
She was stunned, she said, to receive the award when so many other exceptional American poets and writers have been overlooked. “When you think of the American poets who have not gotten the Nobel, it’s daunting,” she said. “I was shocked.”
Glück is the first female poet to be awarded the prize since Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish writer, in 1996. Other poets to have received the award include Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who won in 1995. She is the first American to win since Bob Dylan in 2016.