American poet Louise Gluck awarded 2020 Nobel Prize for literature

 

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

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Louise Gluck , 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.

Gluck , 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 Gluck ’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 humour and biting wit”.

Ararat, a collection of poems from 1990, was “the most brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry published in the last 25 years,” Dwight Garner wrote in a 2012 New York Times article.

William Logan, in a 2009 Times review of A Village Life, called Gluck “perhaps the most popular literary poet in America”. Her audience may not be as large as others’, he wrote, but “part of her cachet is that her poems are like secret messages for the initiated.”