American poet Louise Gluck scoops Nobel Prize for Literature
THE Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded to American poet Louise Gluck “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
The prize was announced in Stockholm by Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
New York-born Gluck, 77, who is a professor of English at Yale
University, made her debut in 1968 with Firstborn, and “was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature”, the Nobel Academy said.
Her poetry is “characterised by a striving for clarity”, often focusing on childhood and family life, and close relationship with parents and siblings, it said.
It noted her 2006 collection Averno, calling it “masterly” and “a visionary interpretation of
the myth of Persephone’s descent into hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death”.
The award, which includes a 10 million kronor (£872,000) prize, comes after several years of controversy and scandal for the world’s pre-eminent literary accolade.
She is the fourth woman to win the prize for literature since 2010, and only the 16th since the Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901. The last American to win was Bob
Dylan in 2016.
Glück won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris and the National Book Award in 2014.
Her other honours include the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, given in 2008, and a National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2015. She was also editor of the anthology The Best American Poetry 1993.
In 2018 the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, the body that chooses the winners, and sparked a mass exodus of members.
After the academy revamped itself in a bid to regain the trust of the Nobel Foundation, two laureates were named last year, with the 2018 prize going to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke. Still to come this year are prizes for peace and economics.