Author of the week

Louise Glück

“By now, Louise Glück should be accustomed to acclaim,” said Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. Before being named last week as only the second American winner of the Nobel Prize in literature this century, the 77-year-old poet had garnered virtually every other available literary accolade. But Glück was at least momentarily flummoxed when she received the early-morning call from Stockholm. “My first thought was ‘I won’t have any friends’—because most of my friends are writers,” she told the Nobel committee official. About that, Glück was at least half wrong, said fellow poet Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker. Other writers were ecstatic about the news, in part because her work is so thrilling, in part because Glück has been a generous mentor to so many young writers during her decades of teaching at Goddard College, Williams, Stanford, and Yale.

Glück admits she may use part of the $1.1 million Nobel award to buy a house in Vermont.

But she is not retiring. She has recently finished a new collection, her 13th, which will be published in 2021 and which takes “falling apart,” in her phrase, as its theme. “I’ve written about death since I could write,” she says. “Aging is more complicated. Faculties that you counted on—physical grace and strength and mental agility—these things are being compromised. It’s been very interesting to think and write about.” She promises there will be “a lot of mourning” but also a lot of comedy. To Glück, one of the few good things to say about old age is that it is a new adventure. “Diminishment is not everybody’s most anticipated joy,” she says. “But there is news in this situation. And that, for a poet or writer, is invaluable.”