NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday (Oct 8) 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, 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 humour and biting wit".
Reached at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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 five 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 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 writer's 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, ageing 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 critic and writer Daniel Mendelsohn, 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 Thursday. "Otherwise I would bore myself to tears."
Her sentences are often spare, 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 ageing and mortality, and will be released by FSG next year.
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, 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 US because of coronavirus travel restrictions, said Mats Malm, 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.
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 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 honoured. Everyone does."
