U.S. poet winner of Nobel in literature
The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to Louise Gluck, one of America’s most celebrated poets, for writing “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
The award was announced at a news conference in Stockholm.
Gluck, whose name rhymes with the word “click,” 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 U.S. poet laureate in 2003.
At the Nobel announcement, Anders Olsson, chair of the prize-giving committee, praised her minimalist voice and especially poems that get to the heart of family life.
“Louise Gluck’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, Gluck said she was “completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet.”
She was stunned, she said in the interview, 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.”
Born in New York City in 1943, Gluck grew up on Long Island and from an early age was drawn to reading and writing poetry. Her parents read her classical mythology as bedtime stories, and she was transfixed by the tales of Greek gods and heroes — themes she would later explore in her work.
She wrote some of her earliest verses when she was 5 and set her mind to becoming a poet when she was in her early teens. She struggled with anorexia as a teenager, a disease she later attributed to her obsession with purity and achieving control, and almost starved herself to death before eventually recovering through therapy.
She began taking poetry workshops around that time, and attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University, where she studied with poet Stanley Kunitz.
She supported herself by working as a secretary so that she could write on the side. In 1968, she published her first collection, “Firstborn.” While her debut was well-received by critics, she wrestled with writer’s block afterward and took a teaching position at Goddard College in Vermont. Working with students inspired her to start writing again, and she went on to publish a dozen volumes of poetry.
Gluck herself has expressed discomfort with the notion of her poetry as popular.
“When I’m told I have a large readership, I think, ‘ Oh great, I’m going to turn out to be Longfellow’: somebody easy to understand, easy to like, the kind of diluted experience available to many. And I don’t want to be Longfellow,” she said in a 2009 interview with American Poet, journal of the Academy of American Poets.
Gluck 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 Northern Irish poet, who won in 1995. She is the first American to win since Bob Dylan in 2016.
She will give her Nobel lecture in the United States because of coronavirus travel restrictions, said Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize.