Louise Glück awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in literature

American poet Louise Glück (b. 1943, New York City) has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in literature. Her debut volume of poems, Firstborn, was published in 1968. An author of 12 books of poetry, she has received many prestigious literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris (1992), the PEN Award for her essays Proofs and Theories (1994), and the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). She was the U.S. Poet Laureate 2003–2004.

In her poetry, distinguished by a revisionist use of Greek and Roman myths, she fuses imagist precision with mystical discourse. Her lyric voice shifts between various positions: a prophet, an acute but distanced observer of reality, and a participant of an intensely emotional experience. Her poems, often subtly autobiographical, deal with loss, despair, suffering and absence. Probing the relationship between immanence and transcendence, time and transience, perception and epiphany, the said and the unsaid, the poet seeks universal truths in the intimacies and contingencies of private life.

Asked about the inspiration behind her work, the poet has said: “I never have the slightest thing in mind. In fact, I am suspicious of my existing ideas, my conscious thoughts and convictions. They are what I need to get beyond, into ignorance and after that, with luck, discovery. I begin to write when a phrase appears in my head—a word cluster, sometimes a single word. The task is to discover the world or voice from which this fragment can speak or elaborate itself into a story or a personality or a mood” (Interview with Claire Luchette, Poetry Foundation). The Royal Swedish National Academy recognized Glück’s poetry for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

The poet currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.