Louise Glück Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature


Louise Glück Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Louise Glück, one of America’s most celebrated poets, “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

The award was announced at a news conference in Stockholm.

Glück, who was born in New York in 1943, has written numerous poetry collections, many of which deal with the challenges of family life and growing older. They include “The Wild Iris,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” about mortality and grief, from 2014. She was named the United States’ poet laureate in 2003.

At the Nobel announcement, Anders Olsson, the chair of the prize-giving committee, praised her minimalist voice and especially poems that get to the heart of family life.

“Louise Glück’s voice is unmistakable,” he said. “It is candid and uncompromising, and it signals this poet wants to be understood.” But he also said her voice was also “full of humor and biting wit.”

That furor over the award came a year after the academy postponed the 2018 prize because of a scandal involving the husband of an academy member who was accused of sexual misconduct and of leaking information to bookmakers. That man, Jean-Claude Arnault, was later sentenced to two years in prison for rape.

Those events were a low point for the prize, which dates to 1901 and has been awarded to some of the world’s most influential and revered novelists, poets and playwrights. Prominent past laureates include Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, Gabriel García Márquez, Saul Bellow and Albert Camus. In 1964, the academy chose Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the honor, saying that writers should not accept awards.

Given the recent controversies, many observers expected this year’s award to go to an uncontroversial choice. “The Swedish Academy knows they can’t afford another scandal,” Bjorn Wiman, the culture editor of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, said in a telephone interview before the announcement.

But an adviser to the prize-giving committee denied this in an email on Wednesday. “We haven’t focused on making a ‘safe’ pick or discussed the choice in such terms,” said Rebecka Karde, a journalist and one of three external experts who helped choose this year’s winner. “It’s all about the quality of the output of the writer who gets it.”

The Nobel Prize in Literature, which is given for a writer’s entire body of work and is regarded as perhaps the world’s most prestigious literary award, comes with a prize of 10 million Swedish krona, or about $1.1 million.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.


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