Anne Carson Wins the Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize committee announced this morning that the Canadian poet, essayist, classicist, and translator Anne Carson has won the 2026 award in literature, praising her “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” In the fall of 2004, the Review published an Art of Poetry interview with Carson, who was then teaching classics at the University of Michigan, and, as her interviewer, Will Aitken, writes in his introduction to the interview, “reluctant to call herself a poet.” In their conversation—which spans Carson’s relationship with God (or lack thereof), her life (in Aitken’s words) “as a gay man,” and the boxing class Carson was taking at the time—Carson reveals her motivations for writing: “I write to find out what I think about something.” INTERVIEWER I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and battered. CARSON In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For i