STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 has been awarded to Louise Glück, the American poet, for what the Swedish Academy called her unmistakable poetic voice that, with austere beauty, makes individual existence universal.
Glück, 77, is one of the most decorated poets in the United States: a former poet laureate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for “The Wild Iris” and the National Book Award for “Faithful and Virtuous Night”. She is the sixteenth woman to win the literature Nobel, and the first American to take it since Bob Dylan in 2016.
The choice is being read as a deliberate reset. The Academy is still recovering from the crisis that engulfed it in 2018 — a sexual assault scandal involving the husband of a member, which forced the postponement of that year’s prize — and from the furious reaction to the 2019 award to Peter Handke, a defender of the Milošević regime. This year it has chosen an uncontroversial laureate of unarguable literary standing.
Glück’s work is spare, classical and often dark: poems of family, myth, marriage and survival, written across six decades. The Academy singled out “Averno”, her 2006 collection built on the Persephone myth.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the laureate gave her first reaction from home, saying she was flabbergasted. In a year when gatherings are cancelled and bookshops shuttered, the world’s largest literary prize has gone to the quietest of forms: the lyric poem.
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