Poet Louise Glück Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

American poet Louise Glück has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the New York Times reported. Glück received the award “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” at the Nobel announcement in Stockholm.

Glück has authored numerous poetry collections throughout her decades-long career, including The Wild Iris, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. She was made the United States Poet Laureate in 2003.

Born in New York in 1943, Glück has been called “perhaps the most popular literary poet in America” by William Logan in a 2009 Times review of Glück’s collection A Village Life. In 2012, Dwight Garner called Glück’s 1990 collection, Ararat, “the most brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry published in the last 25 years.” She is the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in literature since Bob Dylan in 2016, and the first female poet since Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.

“Louise Glück’s voice is unmistakable,” Anders Olsson, chair of the prize-giving committee, at the Nobel announcement. “It is candid and uncompromising, and it signals this poet wants to be understood.”

Glück will deliver her Nobel lecture in the U.S. due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.