The US poet Louise Glück has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday.
“Louise Glück has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry. All are characterized by a striving for clarity,” the academy said in a statement, “Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her.”
The academy said that in her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self.
“Louise Glück is not only engaged by the shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss,” it added.
The academy said that “in one of her most lauded collections, The Wild Iris (1992), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, she describes the miraculous return of life after winter in the poem ‘Snowdrops’”.
The American poet was born in New York City in 1943, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a Professor of English at Yale University.
Glück is one of the most prominent poets in contemporary American literature, and has received several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and the National Book Award in 2014, the academy noted.
