US poet wins Nobel literature prize as judges turn the page on controversies
American poet Louise Gluck was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
Judges said she was chosen for her poetic voice “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Gluck’s win was announced on Thursday by Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which oversees the annual award.
Her first collection of poems, Firstborn, was published in 1968 and she has gone on to become one of the most prominent poets in American literature, with later works such as The Wild Iris, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize.
The academy said Gluck, 77, produced poems that were “characterised by a striving for clarity” and often focused on childhood and family life.
It praised her 2006 collection Averno and said it was “a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death”.
In 2016, the US president at the time, Barack Obama, awarded Gluck the National Humanities Medal.
The White House said she received the honour “for giving lyrical expression to our inner conflicts”.
Gluck’s receipt of the prize was uncontroversial, in contrast with the academy’s choice last year, the Austrian novelist Peter Handke.
His selection provoked a flood of criticism because of his support for the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic during the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s.
That came on the back of a drawn-out scandal after the husband of a member of the academy was jailed for rape.
As a result, the academy postponed the 2018 literature prize for the first time in about 70 years.
The academy said Handke merited the prize, but she faced criticism from literature experts such as Swedish journalist Bjorn Wiman.
He previously tipped the American novelist Jamaica Kincaid for this year’s award.
“Her stance on various moral and political issues are absolutely worth listening to today,” he wrote.
Gluck was the latest recipient of a Nobel prize this week. On Monday, the physiology or medicine award was given to three scientists who discovered the hepatitis C virus.
The Nobel Prize committee said the discovery saved millions of lives.
A day later, the prize in physics was shared by three scientists for their work on black holes and on Wednesday the chemistry prize was given to two scientists behind a gene-editing tool known as genetic scissors.
The prize for each category is a medal and 10 million Swedish krona ($1.1m), which is shared among the winners.
They would normally have received their prizes from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, but the plans were changed because of the pandemic.
Instead, the laureates were shown in a televised ceremony receiving their awards in their home countries.
Judges say Gluck was chosen for her poetic voice ‘ that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’