Canadian poet Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

The Swedish Academy announced the award on Thursday. Carson, who splits her time between Iceland — where she has held citizenship since 2022 — and New York, had been among the favourites.

She succeeds last year’s winner, Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Literature was the fourth Nobel announced this week, after medicine, physics and chemistry. The peace prize follows today, with economics on October 12.

Carson’s genre-defying work blends poetry, essay and classical scholarship. She takes her place alongside laureates from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway.

Carson is best known for works like Autobiography of Red and Plainwater, which blend classical myth with modern life. She joins a small group of women to have won the literature prize since 1901.