The 2020 Nobel Literature Prize went to American Jewish poet Louise Glück, the jury at the Swedish Academy said. The prize was announced in Stockholm by Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
Gluck, 77, was honored “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” the Academy said.
Glück, a professor of English at Yale University, “seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works,” it said.
Born in New York in City 1943, Glück’s paternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews who emigrated to the United States. Her father, Daniel Glück, was in business with his brother-in-law and invented the X-Acto brand of precision craft knife still in production.
The Academy said her 2006 collection “Averno” was a “masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into Hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death.”
Glück published her first poems in 1968 in a collection titled “Firstborn.” She has published over a dozen books since then and in 2003 was named poet laureate of the United States. Many of her works draw from Roman and Greek classical themes, though critics have also detected traces of her Jewish heritage in a number of poems.
The author has previously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection “The Wild Iris,” and the National Book Award in 2014.
Glück would normally receive the Nobel from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.
But the in-person ceremony has been canceled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic and replaced with a televised ceremony showing the laureates receiving their awards in their home countries.
The prize, which includes 10 million kronor (more than $1.1 million) prize, comes after several years of controversy and scandal for the world’s pre-eminent literary accolade.
