A Beginners Guide to Anne Carson

For the uninitiated, five gateways to the addictive and singular writing of Anne Carson, this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature

When you consider that poet and author Anne Carson admired Oscar Wilde so much she wore an Oscar Wilde outfit throughout her adolescence, it seems only fitting that she went on to win a swathe of awards including The TS Eliot Prize, Griffin Prize – and now the Nobel Prize in Literature 2026. She is a writer who wants to write, not to talk about writing or what it means to be a writer. 

Carson, born in Canada in 1950, is loved for her genre-bending writing: poetry, plays, prose and essays which frequently weave in and borrow from her interest in Ancient Greek – she began to study the subject in high school and is a Classics professor. 

When Ingrid Carlberg from the Nobel’s Swedish Academy rang Carson about the win, she replied that she was in Iceland “listening to the wind”. Carson later expressed complete shock when she told radio station RUV the decision was “crazy”. This is all in keeping with her commitment to centering her writing and not herself, her own privacy and her wholesale rejection of celebrity. She also rejects PR and marketing – so there are no “Essential! Compelling! Necessary!” claims on her covers, which is pretty refreshing in an era of rampant promotion. 

She is also not one for overweening author biographies, instead giving a couple of strictly factual sentences, for example “Anne Carson lives in Canada and teaches Ancient Greek for a living”. Although these days she also resides in Michigan, USA and Iceland. But for anyone who is envisaging a timid wallflower, think again, because Carson also said this: “You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.”

What poem or collection or essay best serves as an introduction to Carson is up for debate but the following list offers works pertinent to the essential aspects of who she is and how she works. 

1. The Glass Essay 

From her 1995 collection, Glass, Irony and God, this is possibly her best known, most celebrated poem which now has legendary status in literary circles. It’s anchored in the hopelessness of an undesired break-up, in which the narrator is compelled to visit her mother who lives on a moorland where snow is described as “huge white paws over doors and porches”. And from here the references to Emily Brontë and her own harsh terrain, the land of Wuthering Heights, are woven through. The narrator feels she is becoming Brontë. There are some lines on sadness that cut right through: 

I lived my life,
Which felt like a switched-off TV.
Something has gone through me and out and I could not own it.

And some that devastate: “girls are cruelest to themselves”. At 36 pages long, The Glass Essay is a short story as a poem and completely riveting.

2. Autobiography of Red 

Published in 1998 this is a novel in poetry form anchored in Greek mythology and possibly Carson’s best-known work. Inspired by Stesichorus, she tells the tale of Hercules, or rather the monster who he killed, Geryon. This emphasis on the underdog, the victim, the defeated, is characteristic of Carson. She recreates both hero and monster as teenagers, engaged in a romantic, sexual relationship: “Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.”

There’s also plenty of evidence of her humour and quotidian observations, happily enmeshed within a classical setting and story. 

Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.

3. The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos 

Presenting relationships as dance, this work of narrative verse, charts one woman’s lust for her husband, who is magnificent looking. It is this link between desire and beauty that Carson explores here – from teenage swooning through bouts of raging jealousy thanks to the beautiful husband's infidelity, to the bitter collapse of a marriage. 

Keats, his preoccupation with good looks and sexual jealousy (he believed “beauty is truth”) looms large – the start of every chapter contains an epigraph from the Romantic poet. This is classic Carson, in that she yolks together her own literary inspirations with modern life and her own experiences. The idea that the narrator should accept the way things played out for her because of her husband’s beauty is heartbreakingly relatable. 

One particularly notable section, very Carson for its clever wordplay, complete with a sting in its tail, reads:

You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness."
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce
a golden rule.

4. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy 

In her play about female objectification and male violence, first staged in 2019 (starring Ben Whishaw), Carson blends the story of Helen of Troy and the biography of Marilyn Monroe. In Carson’s retelling, the latter resides in LA’s Chateau Marmont while she works on a movie. She stitches and patches and melds details from both women, living millennia apart, so as to create a most unlikely and yet still cohesive narrative. Of course these two icons should be in dialogue! 

It requires a working knowledge of both the Golden Age of Hollywood and both versions of Helen of Troy (one in which she is a phantom – hence Carson referring to Helen as a cloud throughout the play). But at its heart it’s about the formidable power of beauty and sex appeal – and of how it is sought to be dismantled – and why. While this is no mental cakewalk, it feels timely and depressingly relevant today, when misogyny remains rife. 

One of its most wrenching lines reads: “They said it was sad I was born good grown bad ... truth is it’s a disaster to be a girl.”

5. Wrong Norma

Carson’s 2024 poetry collection (also illustrated by her, as if she didn’t have enough feathers in her cap) so called because none of the poems – which are largely prose – relate to one another. None of the pieces are in dialogue and there are no apparent links (other than Carson’s inimitable style that consists of taking meaning from personal observation, the Classics, familial experience and so on). Instead, in these 25 texts Carson expresses confusion over the appeal of Louis Vuitton luggage (against a backdrop of violence), the feeling of disappointment during a much-anticipated dinner with old friends and an imagined meeting between Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and Holocaust-surviving Jewish poet Paul Celan. 

As ever, she manages to tackle huge and dark issues with a side of humour that can feel both delicious and disconcerting at once.