Poet Louise Gluck wins Nobel Prize for Literature

STOCKHOLM 

American poet Louise Gluck won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature for works exploring family and childhood in an “unmistakable...voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.

Academy Permanent Secretary Mats Malm said that Gluck, 77, also multiple winners of U.S. literary awards, was “surprised and happy” at the news when it came in the early morning hours U.S. time. She gave no immediate comment to journalists gathered outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported Reuters. 

A professor of English at Yale University, Gluck first rose to critical acclaim with her 1968 collection of poems entitled “Firstborn”, and went on to become one of the most eminent poets and essayists in contemporary America.

The Swedish Academy said that in Gluck’s works “the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting illusions of the self”.

Drawing comparisons with other authors, the Academy said Gluck resembled 19th-century U.S. poet Emily Dickinson in her “severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith”.

Erica McAlpine, associate professor of English at Britain’s Oxford University, said Gluck “has managed to feel urgently contemporary and yet simultaneously timeless”. She added:

“The occasional bleakness of her voice speaks especially well to our present moment, and yet her poetry has always been intimately connected to the long lyric tradition behind it.”

Jonathan Galassi, president of her publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, said via email he was certain the Nobel prize would bring Gluck “to many, many new readers.”

“She is one of the rare contemporary poets whose work has the gift of speaking directly to readers through her great and subtle art,” he said.

Gluck previously was awarded a U.S. Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003-04.

In 2015, then-President Barack Obama honored Gluck with the National Medal of Arts and Humanities, saying her “probing poems capture the quiet drama of nature and the quiet emotions of everyday people”.

Nobel prizes for medicine, physics, and chemistry were awarded earlier this week, and the peace prize is to be announced on Friday.

The Nobel awards are named after dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.