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Louise Glück

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 was awarded to Louise Glück "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal"

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Louise Glück Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

The American writer was lauded “for her unmistakable poetic voice.”

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Louise Glück is the 2020 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

By Alexandra Alter and Alex Marshall

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Louise Glück , one of America’s most celebrated poets, for writing “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

The award was announced at a news conference in Stockholm.

Glück, whose name rhymes with the word “click,” 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 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.”

Reached at her home in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday morning, Glück said she was “completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet.”

She was stunned, she said in the interview , to receive the award when so many other exceptional American poets and writers have been overlooked. “When you think of the American poets who have not gotten the Nobel, it’s daunting,” she said. “I was shocked.”

Born in New York City in 1943, Glück grew up on Long Island and from an early age was drawn to reading and writing poetry. Her parents read her classical mythology as bedtime stories, and she was transfixed by the tales of Greek gods and heroes — themes she would later explore in her work. She wrote some of her earliest verses when she was 5, and set her mind to becoming a poet when she was in her early teens. She struggled with anorexia as a teenager, a disease she later attributed to her obsession with purity and achieving control, and almost starved herself to death before eventually recovering through therapy.

She began taking poetry workshops around that time, and attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University, where she studied with the poet Stanley Kunitz. She supported herself by working as a secretary so that she could write on the side. In 1968, she published her first collection, “Firstborn.” While her debut was well received by critics, she wrestled with writers’ block afterward and took a teaching position at Goddard College in Vermont. Working with students inspired her to start writing again, and she went on to publish a dozen volumes of poetry.

In much of her work, Glück draws inspiration from mythological figures. In her 1996 collection, “Meadowlands,” she weaves together the figures of Odysseus and Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey with the story of the dissolution of a modern-day marriage. In her 2006 collection, “Averno,” she used the myth of Persephone as a lens to mother-daughter relationships, suffering, aging and death.

Glück’s verses often reflect her preoccupation with dark themes — isolation, betrayal, fractured family and marital relationships, death. But her spare, distilled language, and her frequent recourse to familiar mythological figures, gives her poetry a universal and timeless feel, said the critic and writer Daniel Mendelsohn, the editor at large for The New York Review of Books.

“When you read her poems about these difficult things, you feel cleansed rather than depressed,” he said. “This is one of the purest poetic sensibilities in world literature right now. It’s a kind of absolute poetry, poetry with no gimmicks, no pandering to fads or trends. It has the quality of something standing almost as outside of time.”

In an interview in 2012, Glück described writing as “a torment, a place of suffering, harrowing.” Rather than a means of self exploration, she views poetry as a way to extract meaning from loss and pain.

Throughout her career, Glück has returned to familiar themes but has experimented with new poetic forms. “I think you have always to be surprised and to be in a way a beginner again,” she said on Thursday. “Otherwise I would bore myself to tears.”

Her sentences are often spare and pared down and sculpted, and can feel almost oracular at times, conversational at others.

“Like many great poets, she is always reforming herself,” said Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who has edited Glück since 2006. “Once she finished something, it’s sort of dead to her, and she has to start over again.”

This summer, Glück finished work on a new poetry collection, titled “Winter Recipes From the Collective,” which explores the indignities and the surreal comedy of aging and mortality, and will be released by FSG next year.

Literary critics and fellow poets have long admired her intensely distilled language and her unflinching self-examination.

“Her poems are flash bulletins from her inner life, a region that she examines unsparingly,” the poet Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker .

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 herself has expressed discomfort with the notion of her poetry as popular.

“When I’m told I have a large readership, I think, ‘Oh great, I’m going to turn out to be Longfellow : somebody easy to understand, easy to like, the kind of diluted experience available to many. And I don’t want to be Longfellow,” she said in a 2009 interview with American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets.

Glück is the first female poet to be awarded the prize since Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish writer, in 1996 . Other poets to have received the award include Seamus Heaney, the Northern Irish poet, who won in 1995 . She is the first American to win since Bob Dylan in 2016.

She will give her Nobel lecture in the United States because of coronavirus travel restrictions, said Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize.

Many in the book world celebrated the academy’s selection of Glück as a worthy choice made based on purely literary merits. It marks a much-needed reset for the academy and for the literature award, which has been plagued by controversies and scandals in recent years.

Last year, the academy was criticized after it awarded the prize to Peter Handke , an Austrian author and playwright who has been accused of genocide denial for questioning events during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s — including the Srebrenica massacre, in which about 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered.

That furor over the award came a year after the academy postponed the 2018 prize because of a scandal involving the husband of an academy member who was accused of sexual misconduct and of leaking information to bookmakers. That man, Jean-Claude Arnault, was later sentenced to two years in prison for rape .

Those events were a low point for the prize, which dates to 1901 and has been awarded to some of the world’s most influential and revered novelists, poets and playwrights. Prominent past laureates include Toni Morrison , Kazuo Ishiguro , Alice Munro , Gabriel García Márquez , Saul Bellow and Albert Camus . In 1964, the academy chose Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the honor , saying that writers should not accept awards.

Given the recent controversies, many observers expected this year’s award to go to an uncontroversial choice. “The Swedish Academy knows they can’t afford another scandal,” Bjorn Wiman, the culture editor of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, said in a telephone interview before the announcement.

But an adviser to the prize-giving committee denied this in an email on Wednesday. “We haven’t focused on making a ‘safe’ pick or discussed the choice in such terms,” said Rebecka Karde, a journalist and one of three external experts who helped choose this year’s winner. “It’s all about the quality of the output of the writer who gets it.”

The Nobel Prize in Literature, which is given for a writer’s entire body of work and is regarded as perhaps the world’s most prestigious literary award, comes with a prize of 10 million Swedish krona, or about $1.1 million.

For Glück, who has always had a complicated relationship to literary renown, winning the Nobel felt like a long shot, and she found herself unsettled by the news on Thursday.

“I thought my chances were very poor, and that was fine, because I treasure my daily life and my friendships, and I didn’t want my friendships complicated, and I didn’t want my daily life sacrificed,” she said. “But there’s also a kind of covetousness. You want your work honored. Everyone does.”

Who else won a Nobel Prize this year?

Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough that “made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives,” the Nobel committee said.

On Tuesday, Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez received the Physics prize for discoveries that have improved understanding of the universe, including work on black holes .

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their 2012 work on the development of Crispr-Cas9, a method for genome editing.

When will the remaining Nobel Prizes be announced?

The Peace Prize will be announced on Friday. Read about last year’s winner, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia .

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science will be announced on Monday in Sweden. Read about last year’s winners, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer .

Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature – as it happened

The US poet has won ‘for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’

Thank you for joining us today for the liveblog. You can read the full story by Alison Flood here.

The Nobel peace prize will be announced tomorrow at 10am BST (11:00 CEST).

Who is Louise Glück?

Born in 1943, Glück has written 12 collections of poetry and two book of essays. Her most recent collection was 2014’s Faithful and Virtuous Night. Over a career spanning six decades, she has explored trauma, death and healing, in poems that scholars have argued are both confessional and not. As Olsson, chair of the Nobel, said earlier: “She is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. She seeks universality.” (Some poets may dispute that being an either-or.)

Glück has written about developing anorexia as a teenager, which she later said was the result of her efforts to assert independence from her mother, as well as the death of her older sister, which happened before Glück was born. While in therapy, she elected to enrol in poetry workshops over a traditional college education and began to develop her voice. She published her first collection, Firstborn in 1968.

She won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris. She was appointed the US poet laureate in 2003, and visited the White House to receive the National Humanities Medal from US president Barack Obama in 2016.

“Don’t forget to read our marvellous laureate,” Olsson says cheerfully, before wrapping up the conference. Well that’s that!

The Guardian’s resident poetry expert, Carol Rumens , cast an eye over a poem from Glück’s most recent collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, back in 2014. You can read it below.

Explaining their decision, Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee says Glück’s voice “is candid and uncompromising and signals that this poet wants to be understood. She has humour and biting wit.

“Even if her autobiographical background is significant in her works, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. She seeks universality ... Three characteristics unite to reoccur in her works: the topic of family life, an austere but also playful intelligence, and a refined sense of composition.”

This makes Glück the 16th woman to win:

Gabriela Mistral, 1945

Nelly Sachs, 1966

Nadine Gordimer, 1991

Toni Morrison, 1993

Wislawa Szymborska, 1996

Elfriede Jelinek, 2004

Doris Lessing, 2007

Herta Muller, 2009

Alice Munro, 2013

Svetlana Alexievich, 2015

Olga Tokarczuk, 2018

Louise Glück, 2020

And the winner is ... Louise Glück

US poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

BREAKING NEWS: The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/Wbgz5Gkv8C — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2020

Possible contenders: Haruki Murakami

The Japanese novelist is frequently high up in the odds – so much so that a group of diehard fans, also known as “Harukists”, tend to gather each year to watch the ceremony, tumblers of whisky (a motif in his novels) at hand. Japan’s love for Murakami is greater than that for even other Japanese contenders; when British-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro won in 2017, staff at Kinokuniya bookshop in Tokyo reportedly let out a groan before quickly disassembling their immaculate Murakami display and replacing it with Ishiguros.

It has become a bit of a running gag that he never wins – so much so, last year the Japan Times ran a rather intense piece about the nation’s deep disappointment: “In the Kyodo newsroom, a wail of disappointment is heard, champagne is returned to the fridge and trembling hands struggle to a keyboard to punch out the bitter news.”

According to the BBC, Murakami’s eternal struggle puts him in a dream club with Amy Adams and Björk, for cool people who never win stuff. So that’s something. And when Murakami was nominated for the New Academy award – the one-off replacement for the Nobel when it was cancelled – he withdrew from contention, citing a wish to concentrate on his writing. Or did he just want to stay in the club with Amy Adams and Björk? Reason says the latter. Björk would definitely enjoy his weird thing about earlobes.

Possible contenders: Joyce Carol Oates

With more than 100 books to her name, Joyce Carol Oates is rarely far from the adjective “prolific”. Novels, short stories, plays, poetry and criticism have poured from her in an unbroken stream since her debut collection of short fiction was published in 1963. Ranging across genre from thriller to romance and from horror to literary fiction, Oates has explored class, race, gender and the violence of modern society in novels such as Them (1969), Because it is Bitter and Because it is My Heart (1990), Blonde (2000) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).

Writing in the New Yorker about her latest novel, the “frequently brilliant” Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, Leo Robson summed up the appeal of Oates’s often unruly work: “She believes in the itching and the ornery and the oddly shaped, and has been trying to produce fiction that feels as irreducible to simple meanings, as resistant to paraphrase, as the subject matter it portrays.”

The livestream has started

We’re just 10 minutes away - you can watch the video at the top of this liveblog (you may need to refresh your browser if you joined us a while back). Enjoy watching some journalists looking nervous.

Fiammetta Rocco, culture correspondent at the Economist and the administrator of the International Booker prize, knows what she’s talking about when it comes to international literature. Her tips are first, Maryse Condé, “whose work just resonates more and more powerfully as time goes by”, and second, “my fellow Kenyan, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for a lifetime of highly original writing, but especially for The Perfect Nine, which is published today. An epic in every sense of the word.”

Just as the same names come up each year, so to does the video of Doris Lessing finding out that she had won, from back in 2007. But it is too good not to share every time.

Whoever wins #NobelPrize for literature tomorrow, they will never beat this reaction by Doris Lessing. pic.twitter.com/IU50xp0Vvj — Jonny Geller (@JonnyGeller) October 7, 2020

Possible contenders: Péter Nádas

Another perennial contender is the Hungarian novelist, playwright and essayist Péter Nádas. He is best known internationally for his 700-page novel A Book of Memories, which divides the story of a young Hungarian writer growing up under communism between three narrators. When it was published in English in 1997, Eva Hoffman compared it to Proust and Musil in the New York Times, praising Nádas’ exploration of memory “in profligate and fantastically modulated detail, all the compressed meanings, the swirl and buzz of sensation and impression implicit in even the most mundane moments”. Susan Sontag hailed it as “the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century”.

Hungarian reviewers were in raptures over Parallel Stories, a 1,100-page epic that jumps across the last 100 years of Hungarian and German history in disjointed fragments, but critics were divided when it appeared in English in 2011. Francine Prose called it “dense, filthy, brilliant”, but Tibor Fischer said it was “like having your face jammed in someone’s crotch … It’s a great historical soup, with bits of this and that bobbing around, seemingly thrown in randomly by the chef – or, more succinctly, a mess.”

One of the most powerful and distinguished storytellers of our time: Toni Morrison, became the first African American woman to be awarded a #NobelPrize when she received the Literature Prize in 1993. Stay tuned to find out the recipient(s) of the 2020 Literature Prize! pic.twitter.com/QyDDPbpnb0 — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2020

The Nobel Prize has just tweeted this. Does this mean we might see another black female laureate this year? Morrison remains the only black woman to win the prize since it was first awarded in 1901.

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Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded, according to the will of Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Bernhard Nobel , “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” in the field of literature. It is conferred by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

The table provides a list of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A Brief History of All the Women Who Have Won the Nobel Prize

“they must represent us all; they must, with their words, illuminate the universal via the specific.”.

Last October, Annie Ernaux became the seventeenth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is also the first French woman, the sixteenth French citizen, the ninety-sixth European, and the 119th person to win. Reacting to the news, Ernaux said: “To receive the Nobel Prize is, for me, a responsibility to continue . . . speaking from my condition as a woman, it does not seem to me that we, women, have become equal in freedom, in power.”

Months later, Ernaux framed her acceptance lecture around this sense of responsibility, stating: “I do not regard as an individual victory the Nobel prize that has been awarded me. It is neither from pride nor modesty that I see it, in some sense, as a collective victory.”

Ernaux’s claim of a collective ownership for a highly individualized award aligns her with the sixteen other women who have won the prize since its inception in 1901—as does her emphasis on the tension between the patriarchal system the Nobel stems from

(and represents) and the structural position of some of its winners, particularly women. When asked if she anticipated the prize, 2013 laureate Alice Munro replied: “Oh, no, no! I was a woman! . . . I just love the honor, I love it, but I just didn’t think that way.” Learning about her win from a group of reporters as she returned home from a hospital visit, eighty-seven-year-old Doris Lessing was flustered: “ They told me a long time ago they didn’t like me and I would never get it . . . . They sent a special official to tell me so.” Surrounded by snapping cameras, she promised: “I swear I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences, which I will be using from now on.”

Beyond a sense of breaking into a boys’ club and the communal weight that comes with this entry, there is little on the surface to connect the Nobel women writers. There is commonality in impact, accomplishment, and gender, but there is relatively little in terms of nationality, genre, style, and experience. So, what does it mean to win a Nobel Prize as a woman or for each winner, in their specific time and place, to carry the acclaim of this recognition? And what can we, as readers situated in our own times and places, learn from how these women, in their acceptance lectures, make sense of this recognition?

Writers who win the Nobel Prize must have “in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction.” This is the criteria set in the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swede who perhaps changed the world most by inventing dynamite. Though his own professional domain was destruction, he wanted his namesake prize to recognize people whose work has “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”

This edict applies vague gravity and hefty responsibilities to the laureates. Women who have won the literature prize have been assigned roles like “the epicist of female experience” or the “Geiger counter of apartheid.” They are understood to represent specific nations, ideologies, and generations. At the same time, they must represent us all (particularly all women); they must, with their words, illuminate the universal via the specific.

Laureates are chosen by a committee whose membership draws from The Swedish Academy , a group of eighteen literary professionals ( De Aderton, “The Eighteen”) with a lifetime tenure. The academy was installed by King Gustav III in 1786, so it predates the Nobel Foundation by 115 years. The committee selected the first woman Nobel laureate eight years into the existence of the award. This was five years before they ever elected a woman to their ranks (the same woman in both cases: Selma Lagerlöf, who borrowed from realism but returned to the romantic in her folkloric fiction).

Alfred Nobel chose the Swedish Academy as the arbiter of the literature prize, just as he chose groups to select laureates from the other categories (chemistry, peace, medicine, economics). His only instruction for the committees was that, in selecting laureates, “no consideration be given to nationality, but that the prize be awarded to the worthiest person, whether or not they are Scandinavian.”

So, with minimal-yet-lofty guidance, a nineteenth-century armaments tycoon bequeathed a prize that still inspires fierce arguments, intense celebration, and online gambling across the globe. Of course, geography and international politics are inextricably linked to all Nobel Prizes, with literature proving no exception. Too European, too white, too male, too contrary to, or too swayed by illusory cultural tides—criticisms of the committee’s choices abound annually. Summaries of who the laureates are and where they come from arguably reach more people than the winners’ written works (except in the case of Bob Dylan), making identity and nationality a major part of each award.

Though Selma Lägerlof won in 1909, nearly half of the total awards to women are concentrated in just the last eighteen years . Most of the women laureates are from Europe, as are most literature laureates in general. The first Latin American author ever to win was a woman (Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, awarded 1945), and she remains the only Latin American woman to have won. American novelist Toni Morrison is the only Black woman recognized to date, and the body of winners remains overwhelmingly white. In terms of lived experience, the winners have faced famine, war, displacement, illicit romance, racism, motherhood, prestige, derision, and more.

Again, what does it mean for a woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—for the life and work of the writer? For some, like Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich (inventor of “the documentary novel”) and Austrian poet and novelist Herta Müller, it means sudden visibility: newspaper coverage, reprints, new translations. For others (Lessing, Morrison and South African novelist Nadine Gordimer), it’s a capstone in a monumental career that people have been predicting for years.

For all of them, it means roughly one million dollars in prize money and at least a temporary surge in book sales. And it’s perhaps a varied experience for the winner personally. Wisława Szymborska’s friends called her win “the Nobel tragedy” because the intensely private Polish poet was unable to write for years after the onslaught of attention. Meanwhile, Morrison gathered friends to celebrate with her in Stockholm. “ I like the Nobel Prize ,” she said. “Because they know how to give a party.” Winning the prize in 2015 did not protect Alexievich from being forced into her second exile in 2020. Facing abduction and arrest , she fled—leaving behind manuscripts, her home, and a part of the world whose story she invented a new genre to tell.

No matter what the recognition means for these women personally, their names will always be paired with the phrase “Nobel Prize winner” anytime they appear in print. No matter what prospective readers understand about the Nobel Prize’s history, process, and statistics, this moniker will likely suggest to them something important about the writers’ work. And no matter where the writer is from, no matter what or who they write about, in accepting the prize they all accept a huge task: finding the “suitable sentences” to deliver a lecture (or, in Munro’s case, a conversation) that articulates the importance of literature and the meaning of their own life’s work.

Read together, the reflections of the Nobel women reveal a diversity of ideas about what literature can do and a sense of a practitioner’s responsibility to these ideas. While the lectures vary widely in content—from Lessing’s and Gordimer’s concrete political lessons to Szymborska’s larger abstract musings to fables personal (Müller) and universal (Morrison)—each contains observations that are at once totally complex and completely true.

With characteristic directness, “master of the contemporary short story” Munro asserts that she knew she could write about small-town Canadian life because: “I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting.”

Morrison, whose novels explore so many facets of Black American life with language that is as precise as it is poetic, argues that “language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it…Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.”

Lessing, so often setting a prickly (sometimes cynical) tone in her novels of frustrated politics, colonialism, and imagined futures, is hopeful: “It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.”

Müller’s work paints visceral, impressionistic scenes of stifled lives under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Romania. No stranger to having words withheld, she explains: “After all, the more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become.”

“In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal . . . not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.” Only Szymborska, who once wrote “After every war / someone has to clean up,” can be so gentle and so firm at the same time.

Gordimer, whose novels dissect the human wreckage wrought by institutionalized racism and cycles of violence, confirms that “writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.”

Each writer’s Nobel lecture includes something that could be applied across the work of the other women who have won, something that collects the individual work under an umbrella of “benefit to humankind.” Each writer is capable, in her own way (reflective of her style, time, place, and politics), of explaining how the recognition of her work is part of a long, shared story. But if any of the lectures contains something akin to a slogan, it must be Alexievich’s (fitting for a writer whose work, at its core, is aimed at weaving disparate perspectives into an intricate whole). In accepting the prize, she reminds readers and writers alike: “I do not stand alone at this podium. . . . There are voices around me, hundreds of voices.”

_____________________________

This essay is adapted from the foreword from the collection Voices Around Me: Nobel Lectures , which features the full lectures by Alexievich, Gordimer, Lessing, Morrison, Müller, Munro, and Szymborska. Open access publisher Cita Press honors the principles of decentralization, collective knowledge production, and equitable access to knowledge. The pieces brought together here reflect these values in ways that represent each writer’s unique commitments, experiences, and style. We present this book—free, online first, and with an accordant new cover by Fiorella Ferroni—with the open invitation to share in these women’s work and ideas. We hope you return to them, together and apart, often or sometimes, but always with the understanding that there are voices around us, and that language gives us a chance to speak and also to listen.

Jessi Haley

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Louise Glück 2020 Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature

'Faithful and Virtuous Night' book cover

Early this morning, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature to former undergraduate writing student Louise Glück . Glück has been awarded this most prestigious literary award—which honors a writer's full body of work—"for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

The announcement was made early this morning by Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, at a press conference in Stockholm. According to the Nobel Committee which selected Glück for the award, "she seeks the universal" in her poetry, which is characterized by three recurring attributes: "the topic of family life, [an] austere but also playful intelligence, and a refined sense of composition."

"Glück's voice is unmistakable," says chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, Anders Olsson, "It is candid, uncompromising, and it signals that this poet wants to be understood; but it is also a voice full of humor and biting wit."

Glück was a student in Columbia's Undergraduate Writing Program (formerly General Studies Writing Program) in the mid-sixties. While a student at Columbia, she studied with Stanley Kunitz and published her early poems in QUARTO Magazine , a literary magazine created by undergraduates.

Shortly after finishing her studies, Glück made her official debut in 1968 with the publication of Firstborn (New American Library). By 2009, reviewers at The New York Times were naming Glück "perhaps the most popular literary poet in America." She has published twelve collections of poetry, including the critically acclaimed The Wild Iris (HarperCollins 1993), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize . Her newest collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014) won the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry . Among her numerous honors and awards, Glück was also named the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003.

In a short telephone interview recorded shortly after the announcement of the Nobel, Glück shares that " Averno (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) would be a place to start" for those who may be unfamiliar with her work, "or my last book, Faithful and Virtuous Night ."

Glück is the first female poet to be awarded the Nobel in Literature since 1996, and the first American to win since Bob Dylan in 2016. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Glück and other laureates will be presenting their Nobel lectures at "an institution in their own vicinity" and the lectures will be "transmitted digitally." Laureates will then be invited to attend next year's Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm.

In addition to the honor of being named a Nobel Laureate, Glück will be awarded a monetary prize of 10 million Swedish krona ($1.1 million).

Louis Glück was born in 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a professor of English at Yale University. A detailed biography and bibliography as presented by the Nobel Prize Committee can be found here .

Former student Louise Glück accepting the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 'The Wild Iris'

Preview: Nobel Prize for literature is announced on Thursday

Past laureates have included the authors Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow and Ernest Hemingway. The American poet Louise Glück won the 2020 Nobel Prize in literature.

A MARTINEZ, HOST:

In just a few hours, a new name will join the pantheon of Nobel winners in literature. Now, past laureates have included the authors Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow and Ernest Hemingway. NPR's Neda Ulaby joins us now as we wait for updates from Sweden. So, Neda, are we - what? - expecting maybe a big win for James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks this year? What do you think?

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: (Laughter) I don't think so, not unless they have side gigs I don't know about as - I don't know - maybe avant-garde...

MARTINEZ: (Laughter).

ULABY: ...French poets or crusading journalists in Belarus. Seriously, though, A, over the past 20 years, the literature Nobel has tended to go to a certain kind of writer who's pretty obscure outside of academic circles. They're often North American or European, white, extremely distinguished, but not exactly rock stars, except at universities or in their home countries. So just for examples - recent literature winners include the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk and the Austrian experimental playwright Peter Handke.

MARTINEZ: Well, you said rock star. So, I mean, let's not forget about a real rock star - Bob Dylan. He won a Nobel Prize in literature five years ago.

ULABY: Right. And that did feel a little bit like an overcorrection on the part of the...

ULABY: ...Nobel Prize committee, like, maybe they were trying really obviously to appeal to a broader audience, except in some ways because, you know, there were similar generational issues and aesthetic sensibilities going on. And I should add that Bob Dylan was one of two Americans who very recently got the literature Nobel. The last one, just last year - the wonderful poet Louise Gluck.

MARTINEZ: OK. Now, you said that certain geographical areas tend to be overrepresented with the literature Nobel. How much is this really an issue?

ULABY: Let me put it this way, A - more Austrians have won the literature Nobel in the past 20 years than anyone from the entire continent of Africa...

MARTINEZ: Wow.

ULABY: ...Or from the Arab world or from Central America.

ULABY: No Black person has won a literature Nobel since Toni Morrison in 1993. And no one from any East Asian country, except for China or Japan, has ever won. And this is an award intended to be the most prestigious in world literature.

MARTINEZ: And that definitely sounds like overrepresentation - those numbers that you just threw out there. So has this always been the case?

ULABY: You know, actually not. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Nobel Prize for literature went to leading writers from Colombia - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - and from Mexico, Egypt - Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, Derek Walcott from Saint Lucia. It really wasn't as Eurocentric as it's been feeling for the past 20 years.

MARTINEZ: So especially with the cultural reassessments and reckonings that we've been seeing happen all over the world, do you have a sense maybe that there will be changes?

ULABY: Maybe. The Nobel Committee for Literature recently tried to diversify by adding two women in their 50s, and this was after a sexual abuse scandal in 2017. And what that means is that the judges are now six Swedish writers whose combined age is more than 400 years. So they seem to have realized that the prize's relevance has dwindled in the popular imagination, and the chairman has promised to start drawing on experts next year that will help the committee consider literature beyond Europe and North America. Ideally, this is supposed to help make the Nobel Prizes more about global human achievements, even in countries that are not rich in any resources beyond the imagination.

MARTINEZ: Yeah. All right, so who are some of the literature front-runners this year?

ULABY: Well, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o comes up every year as a strong possibility. He is what we call a perennial Nobel bridesmaid. Other names that come up a lot are the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, the Syrian poet Adonis and the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. There's a French writer named Annie Ernaux who's getting a lot of buzz, even though if she won, it would make her the third writer from France since 2008 to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

MARTINEZ: That's NPR's Neda Ulaby, who covers arts and culture. Thanks a lot.

ULABY: Thank you, A.

(SOUNDBITE OF AS THE POETS AFFIRM'S "I AM PLEASANT")

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Nobel prize-winning japanese novelist kenzaburo oe dies at 88.

Japanese Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe, a writer who was renowned for a strong pacifist stance that weaved its way into much of his work, has died of “old age”, his publisher confirmed Monday.

The publisher, Kodansha, said the 88-year-old had passed away ten days earlier on March 3.

The Nobel Prize website described Kenzaburo Oe as someone “who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today”.

Born in 1935 in the western prefecture of Ehime, Oe debuted as a writer in 1957 and went on to win his Nobel Prize in literature almost four decades later.

He was handed the award in 1994, becoming the second from his country to claim the title following short story writer Kawabata Yasunari’s win in 1968.

Oe’s writing is heavily influenced by his childhood memory, having grown up around time when Japan was defeated in World War Two.

He wrote about the plight of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and had in recent years taken part in rallies against former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to review Japan’s pacifist constitution.

“By exercising collective self-defence, Japan will directly participate in a war,” Oe told people at a rally in 2014.

“I’m afraid that Japan’s spirit is approaching its most dangerous stage in the past 100 years,” he added.

Abe, who was assassinated last year, had long argued Japan needed a more assertive approach to defense, especially given China’s historic rise in recent decades.

Oe’s other inspiration was his brain-damaged son, Hikari, who was unable to communicate for years as a child.

The writer, who was married Yukari, the sister of late film director Juzo Itami, saw it as his mission to give his oldest son a voice through his writing.

The young Oe studied French literature as a graduate student at Tokyo University. He began publishing stories during his studies and won the career-launching Akutagawa Prize, which paved the way for his rise to prominence in the literary scene.

Following his Nobel Prize, he was subsequently awarded Japan’s Order of Culture, handed to the country’s top artists, writers and scientists for their outstanding contributions.

But Oe refused to accept it at the time because it was awarded by the Emperor.

“I do not recognise any authority, any value, higher than democracy,” he said.

He also advocated for Japan to relinquish nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Japan’s Kenzaburo Oe, awarded Nobel for poetic fiction, dies

TOKYO — Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe, whose darkly poetic novels were built from his childhood memories during Japan’s postwar occupation and from being the parent of a disabled son, has died.

Oe, who was also an outspoken anti-nuclear and peace activist, died on March 3, his publisher, Kodansha Ltd., said in a statement Monday. The publisher did not give further details about his death and said his funeral was held by his family.

Oe in 1994 became the second Japanese author awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

The Swedish Academy cited the author for his works of fiction, in which “poetic force creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

His most searing works were influenced by the birth of Oe’s mentally disabled son in 1963.

“A Personal Matter,” published a year later, is the story of a father coming to terms through darkness and pain with the birth of a brain-damaged son. Several of his later works have a damaged or deformed child with symbolic significance, with the stories and characters evolving and maturing as Oe’s son aged.

Hikari Oe had a cranial deformity at birth that caused mental disability. He has a limited ability to speak and read but has become a musical composer whose works have been performed and recorded on albums.

The only other Japanese to win a Nobel in literature was Yasunari Kawabata in 1968.

Despite the outpouring of national pride over Oe’s win, his principal literary themes evoke deep unease here. A boy of 10 when World War II ended, Oe came of age during the American occupation.

“The humiliation took a firm grip on him and has colored much of his work. He himself describes his writing as a way of exorcising demons,” the Swedish Academy said.

Childhood wartime memories strongly colored the story that marked Oe’s literary debut, “The Catch,” about a rural boy’s experiences with an American pilot shot down over his village. Published in 1958, when Oe was still a university student, the story won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize for new writers.

He also wrote nonfiction books about Hiroshima’s devastation and rise from the Aug. 6, 1945, U.S. atomic bombing, as well as about Okinawa and its postwar U.S. occupation.

Oe has campaigned for peace and anti-nuclear causes, particularly since the 2011 Fukushima crisis, and has often appeared in rallies.

In 2015, Oe criticized Japan’s decision to restart nuclear reactors in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami-triggered meltdown at the Fukushima plant, calling it a risk that could lead to another disaster. He urged then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to follow Germany’s example and phase out atomic energy.

“Japanese politicians are not trying to change the situation but only keeping the status quo even after this massive nuclear accident, and even if we all know that yet another accident would simply wipe out Japan’s future,” Oe said.

Oe, who was 80 then, said his life’s final work is to strive for a nuclear-free world: “We must not leave the problem of nuclear plants for the younger generation.”

The third of seven children, Oe was born on Jan. 31, 1935, in a village on Japan’s southern island of Shikoku. At the University of Tokyo, he studied French literature and began writing plays.

The academy noted that Oe’s work has been strongly influenced by Western writers, including Dante, Poe, Rabelais, Balzac, Eliot and Sartre.

But even with those influences, Oe brought an Asian sensibility to bear.

In 2021, thousands of pages of his handwritten manuscripts and other works were sent to be archived at the University of Tokyo.

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Nobel prize in literature laureate 2020.

Title: The Wild Iris, Author: Louise Glück

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Title: Poems 1962-2012, Author: Louise Glück

Nobel literature prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe dies at 88

Japanese writer Oe used words to preach pacifism

Tokyo: Kenzaburo Oe, who won Japan its second Nobel Prize for literature with books about pacifism and his disabled son, has died.

His death, on March 3 at the age of 88, was due to old age, his publisher Kodansha said.

Ten years old when Japan was defeated in World War Two, Oe was scarred by his memories, which included being asked in school every day if he was willing to die for the Emperor and feeling shame when realising in bed at night that he wasn’t.

He wrote about gruesome tales of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and noted how his shock at what he heard may have been his inspiration for becoming a writer.

Oe was never afraid to hold his native country to account and was scathing about former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution.

Japan bore “some” responsibility for the war, he said in a 2014 interview.

“This war, in which so many large powers were involved, caused great suffering for people all over the world... And it is a reality that within this immense war, nuclear weapons were created and used.”

His brain-damaged son Hikari also became a driving force of his literature. Hikari was for years unable to communicate with his family but as an adult became known as a composer. Oe has said that much of his writing was an attempt to give Hikari a voice.

Several of Oe’s books have characters based on Hikari, with one, “A Personal Matter,” talking about difficulties accepting the child. The Nobel committee singled out a number of these books when he won the prize in 1994.

“Although I myself am perhaps quite a dark novelist, I believe that also my novels show a kind of trust in human beings,” he said in 2014. “And this has come from my son.”

Oe was born in Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands, the third son of seven children. After his father died suddenly in 1944 at home he was raised by his mother, who bought him books such as “Huckleberry Finn.” A graduate of Tokyo University, where he studied French Literature, Oe began publishing stories while still a student and won the Akutagawa Prize, a career-launching award for new writers, in 1958. A steady stream of work followed, including books on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

His Nobel Prize was followed by Japan’s Order of Culture, but he refused to accept it because it was awarded by the Emperor and said: “I do not recognise any authority, any value, higher than democracy.”

Always a pacifist, Oe became an even more vocal critic after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, saying that Japan had “a sacred duty” to renounce nuclear power, the same way it renounced war under its constitution.

In 2013 he organised an anti-nuclear rally in Tokyo and in 2015 joined thousands to protest moves by Abe to let Japanese troops fight abroad.

In 1960 he married Yukari, the sister of late film director Juzo Itami, noted for his satires of modern life. Hikari, the first of their three children, was born four years later.

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Kenzaburo Oe of Japan, Nobel Prize-winning writer of darkly poetic novels, dies at 88

Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe, whose darkly poetic novels were built from his childhood memories during Japan’s postwar occupation and from being the parent of a disabled son, has died. He was 88.

His publisher, Kodansha Ltd., said in a statement Monday that Oe had died of old age March 3. The publisher did not give further details about his death and said his funeral was held by his family.

Oe in 1994 became the second Japanese author awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Swedish Academy cited the author for works of fiction in which “poetic force creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

Oe’s most searing works were influenced by the birth of his mentally disabled son in 1963 .

FILE - Japanese Kenzaburo Oe, left, receives the Nobel Prize for Literature from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf, right, at the Concert Hall in Stockholm Sweden, Dec. 10, 1994. Japanese publisher Kodansha Ltd. said Monday, March 13, 2023 that Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe died of old age. Oe's darkly poetic novels were built from a childhood during Japan’s postwar occupation and parenthood with a disabled son. (AP Photo/Gunnar Ask, File)

From the archives: A voice of postwar Japan wins Nobel for literature

Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese enfant terrible who gave voice to a generation set adrift by the destruction of their values and dreams after World War II, won the Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday in Stockholm.

The only other Japanese writer to win a Nobel in literature was Yasunari Kawabata in 1968.

Despite the outpouring of national pride over Oe’s win, his principal literary themes evoke deep unease in Japan . A boy of 10 when World War II ended, Oe came of age during the American occupation.

“The humiliation took a firm grip on him and has colored much of his work. He himself describes his writing as a way of exorcising demons,” the Swedish Academy said.

FILE - Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe speaks during a press conference about an anti-nuclear petition drive in Tokyo, Sept. 6, 2011. Japanese publisher Kodansha Ltd. said Monday, March 13, 2023 that Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe died of old age. Oe's darkly poetic novels were built from a childhood during Japan’s postwar occupation and parenthood with a disabled son. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi, File)

Review: ‘The Changeling’ by Kenzaburo Oe

‘The Changeling’ by Kenzaburo Oe

Childhood wartime memories strongly colored the story that marked Oe’s literary debut, “The Catch,” about a rural boy’s experiences with an American pilot shot down over his village.

Published in 1958, when Oe was still a university student, the story won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize for new writers.

He also wrote nonfiction books about Hiroshima’s devastation and rise from the Aug. 6, 1945, U.S. atomic bombing, as well as about Okinawa and its postwar U.S. occupation.

Oe campaigned for peace and anti-nuclear causes, particularly after the 2011 Fukushima crisis, and often appeared at rallies.

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Oe, who was 80 then, said his life’s final work was to strive for a nuclear-free world: “We must not leave the problem of nuclear plants for the younger generation.”

Oe, the third of seven children, was born Jan. 31, 1935, in a village on Japan’s southern island of Shikoku . At the University of Tokyo, he studied French literature and began writing plays.

Theodore Kanamine pictured when the U.S. Army promoted him to Brigadier General in 1976.

Theodore Kanamine dies; Japanese American prison camp survivor who became Army general

Throughout his military career, Kanamine led the investigation into the My Lai Massacre and researched the toxic chemical Agent Orange.

The academy noted that Oe’s work has been strongly influenced by Western writers, including Dante, Poe, Rabelais, Balzac, Eliot and Sartre.

But even with those influences, Oe brought an Asian sensibility to bear on his work.

In 2021, thousands of pages of his handwritten manuscripts and other works were sent to be archived at the University of Tokyo.

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Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, who wrote of war and his son, dies at 88

Japan's Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe dies at 88

[1/4] Japanese Nobel literature prize winner Kenzaburo Oe makes a speech at a rally against a possible restart of nuclear reactors in Tokyo, Japan June 6, 2012. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo

TOKYO, March 13 (Reuters) - Kenzaburo Oe, who won Japan its second Nobel Prize for literature with books about the horrors of war and about his disabled son, has died at the age of 88.

Oe also later became known as a prominent campaigner against nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

His death, on March 3, was due to old age, his publisher Kodansha said.

He wrote about gruesome tales of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and noted how his shock at what he had heard may have been his inspiration for becoming a writer.

Oe was never afraid to hold his country to account and was scathing about former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to revise Japan's pacifist constitution.

Japan bore "some" responsibility for the war, he said in a 2014 interview.

"This war, in which so many large powers were involved, caused great suffering for people all over the world... And it is a reality that within this immense war, nuclear weapons were created and used."

Latest Updates

View 2 more stories

Several of Oe's books have characters based on Hikari, with one, "A Personal Matter," talking about difficulties accepting the child. The Nobel committee singled out a number of these books when he won the prize in 1994.

"Although I myself am perhaps quite a dark novelist, I believe that also my novels show a kind of trust in human beings," he said in 2014. "And this has come from my son."

Oe was born in Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's main islands, the third son of seven children. After his father died suddenly in 1944 at home he was raised by his mother, who bought him books such as "Huckleberry Finn."

A graduate of Tokyo University, where he studied French literature, Oe began publishing stories while still a student and won the Akutagawa Prize, a career-launching award for new writers, in 1958. A steady stream of work followed, including books on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

His Nobel Prize was followed by Japan's Order of Culture, but he refused to accept it because it was awarded by the Emperor. "I do not recognise any authority, any value, higher than democracy," he said.

Always a pacifist, Oe became an even more vocal critic after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, saying that Japan had "a sacred duty" to renounce nuclear power, the same way it renounced war under its constitution. In 2013 he organised an anti-nuclear rally in Tokyo and in 2015 joined thousands to protest moves by Abe to let Japanese troops fight abroad.

In 1960 he married Yukari, the sister of late film director Juzo Itami, noted for his satires of modern life. Hikari, the first of their three children, was born four years later.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

South Korea's willingness to resolve historical disputes in the name of improving relations with Japan is largely driven by concerns over North Korea's growing capabilities, and managing any rivalry with China, officials and analysts say.

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