Anne Carson

Anne Patricia Carson (born June 21, 1950) is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.

Anne Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950.

Her father was a banker and she grew up in a number of small Canadian towns.

In high school, a Latin instructor introduced Carson to the world and language of Ancient Greece and tutored her privately.

Enrolling at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, she left twice—at the end of her first and second years.

Carson, disconcerted by curricular constraints (particularly by a required course on Milton), retired to the world of graphic arts for a short time.

She did eventually return to the University of Toronto where she completed her Bachelor of Arts in 1974, her Master of Arts in 1975, and her Ph.D. in 1981.

She also spent a year studying Greek metrics and Greek textual criticism at the University of St Andrews.

Trained as a classicist, and with an interest in comparative literature, anthropology, history, and the arts, Carson fuses ideas and themes from many fields in her writing.

She frequently references, modernises, and translates Ancient Greek and Latin literature – writers such as Aeschylus, Catullus, Euripides, Homer, Ibycus, Mimnermus, Sappho, Simonides, Sophocles, Stesichorus, and Thucydides.

She is also influenced by, and references more modern writers and thinkers, such as Emily Brontë, Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Gertrude Stein, Simone Weil, and Virginia Woolf.

Many of her books blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction to varying degrees.

First editions of Carson's eighteen books of writings (as of 2021) have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, New Directions, and the Princeton University Press in the US, by Brick Books and McClelland & Stewart in Canada, and by Bloodaxe Books, Jonathan Cape, Oberon Books, and Sylph Editions in the UK.

Trained at the University of Toronto, Carson has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada since 1979, including McGill, Michigan, NYU, and Princeton.

A reworking of her 1981 doctoral thesis Odi et Amo Ergo Sum ("I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am"), Eros the Bittersweet "laid the groundwork for her subsequent publications, […] formulating the ideas on desire that would come to dominate her poetic output", and establishing her "style of patterning her writings after classical Greek literature".

Carson's first book of poetry – 1984's Canicula di Anna – garnered her first literary prize: the Quarterly Review of Literature Betty Colladay Award.

Eros the Bittersweet – Carson's first book of criticism, published in 1986 – examines eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain best exemplified by "glukupikron", a word of Sappho's creation and the "bittersweet" of the book's title.

It considers how triangulations of desire appear in the writings of Sappho, ancient Greek novelists, and Plato.

Acclaim for her first book of essays, Eros the Bittersweet, grew in the fifteen years after it was published in 1986: the book "first stunned the classics community as a work of Greek scholarship; then it stunned the nonfiction community as an inspired return to the lyrically based essays once produced by Seneca, Montaigne, and Emerson; and then, and only then, deep into the 1990s, reissued as 'literature' and redesigned for an entirely new audience, it finally stunned the poets."

Carson's early publications saw her shortlisted for the 1994 Journey Prize for "Water Margins", and brought her the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the 1997 Pushcart Prize for her poem "Jaget".

In 1997, Carson was awarded a Rockefeller Bellagio Center Fellowship, followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry in 1998, and a MacArthur Fellowship (commonly known as the "Genius Grant") in 2000.

Early recognition for her work also came from the Quebec Writers' Federation Awards (known as "QSPELL" until 1998), which shortlisted Carson for Short Talks in 1993 before going on to award her the honour three times between 1996 and 2001 (for Glass, Irony, and God, Autobiography of Red, and The Beauty of the Husband).

The National Book Critics Circle Award shortlisted Carson three times (for Autobiography of Red in 1998, Men in the Off Hours in 2000, and Nox in 2010), making her and Alice Munro the first two non-Americans to be nominated after the Award went global in 1998.

She was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 1998 for Glass and God, her first book of poetry published in the UK.

By the turn of the millennium, Eros the Bittersweet had also entered into the popular consciousness, voted onto the 1999 Modern Library Reader's List for the 100 Best Nonfiction books of the 20th century, and mentioned (along with Autobiography of Red) in a 2004 episode of the television series The L Word.

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize four times between 1999 and 2013, Carson won for The Beauty of the Husband in 2001 (her third consecutive nomination), making her the first woman to be awarded this honour.

Men in the Off Hours (2000) is a hybrid collection of short poems, verse essays, epitaphs, commemorative prose, interviews, scripts, and translations from ancient Greek and Latin (of Alcman, Catullus, Sappho and others).

The book broke with Carson's established pattern of writing long poems.

The pieces include diverse references to writers, thinkers, and artists, as well as to historical, biblical, and mythological figures, including: Anna Akhmatova, Antigone, Antonin Artaud, John James Audubon, Augustine, Bei Dao, Catherine Deneuve, Emily Dickinson, Tamiki Hara, Hokusai, Edward Hopper, Longinus (both biblical and literary), Thucydides, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf.

Carson was the first poet to be awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize (for Men in the Off Hours in 2001), and the first to win the prize for a second time (for Red Doc> in 2013).

With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson was awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters.

Carson was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005, the announcement describing her as "a singular voice in the literature of our country".

She was also a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.

She also participated in the Bush Theatre's project Sixty Six Books in 2011, writing a piece titled "Jude: The Goat at Midnight" based on the Epistle of Jude from the King James Bible.

Carson delivered a series of "short talks", or short-format poems on various subjects, at the address to the University of Toronto Ph.D. graduating class of 2012.

She was awarded an honorary degree by her alma mater, the University of Toronto, in 2012.

She also received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in 2014 from the University of St Andrews, where she studied for a diploma with Kenneth Dover in 1975–1976.

In 2018, Carson was longlisted for the one-time New Academy Prize in Literature, established as an alternative to the postponed 2018 Nobel Prize.

In 2020, she was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, with the jury noting that she "has attained levels of intensity and intellectual standing that place her among the most outstanding of present-day writers".

In 2021, Carson won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honouring a body of work marked by "enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship", and received the 2020 Governor General's Award for English-language poetry for Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, an award she was first shortlisted for in 2001 (for Men in the Off Hours).