American Poet Louise Glück Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Louise Glück is the first female poet to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1996, when it was given to Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, and the first American to receive it since 2016, when it was given to Bob Dylan. At the New York Times, Alex Marshall and Alexandra Alter report that "Anders Olsson, the chair of the prize-giving committee, praised her minimalist voice and especially poems that get to the heart of family life." More: 

“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.”

“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 Glück “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.”

Glück will give her Nobel lecture in the United States due to coronavirus restrictions. Learn more about Louise Glück and this prestigious award at the New York Times.