Poet and writer Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, only the third Canadian-born recipient in the prize’s 125-year history. Receiving the news of her $1.7 million prize while in Iceland, the poet was taken completely by surprise, says Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of ‌the Swedish Academy. “All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind.” The air, no doubt, feels a little sweeter for the Toronto-born wordsmith whose highly decorated career spanning four decades includes winning the Governor General’s Award, Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize and a career achievement award from the PEN America Literary Awards. Praised for “her bold and inventive oeuvre” by the Nobel committee, Carson is known for her genre-defying style that moves fluidly between verse, prose and translation, but also draws inspiration from modern and classic sources. In her performance piece Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, for example, she playfully recasts Helen of Troy as Marilyn Monroe. Still, no one has captured the essence of her work quite like the writer herself: “Making a poem is making an object,” she once said. “I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language.”