Small-talk emergency kit: who the heck is Anne Carson?

Sophie Gee (0:03)

Jonty, we're in another of our Secret Life of Books code-read situations. There's breaking news out of Oslo last night.

Jonty Claypole (0:11)

I wouldn't say it's a life or death situation, Sophie, but I think it's more code amber rather than code red.

Sophie Gee (0:18)

Speak for yourself.

I think the awardee of this prize, judging by the title of her most famous book, would disagree because we're speaking about Anne Carson having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last night. What we've got for you is an Anne Carson cheat sheet to get you through dinner parties and other culture gatherings over the next couple of weeks where the talk on everyone's lips is about the awarding of the Nobel Prize to a pretty under the radar English language poet, I think. Had you heard of Carson before?

Jonty Claypole (0:54)

I have, Sophie. In fact, I bought this, Carson God for my brother-in-law, George's bookshop, Special Writer Books when we're in London last month. What I will say about Anne Carson is, I actually knew of Carson for quite a while before I was able to find a way in, and I think that's part of the issue for some people. There's no selected Anne Carson, which is not quite a good way into poets. You just have to choose a book and go with it.

Then her career is split into translations, as you've referred to. She's a very prominent translator of ancient Greek tragedies and also Sappho. Then there's her own work as a poet. But even then, her poetry is very rarely traditional poetry. It's normally a mix of essay and poems. She's actually quite hard to get an entry point into, but I did do it last month, and she's brilliant.

Sophie Gee (1:51)

She is brilliant. Okay. So we've got five pressing questions for people who need an Anne Carson cheat sheet.

Question one, who is this person? So in the poetry world and actually in the academic world, she's been a big cheese for a long time. I remember being at a garden party for a small publisher called Karkinet in London in the late 90s, with a bunch of Oxford poets and saying to them, okay guys, what's the cutting edge of poetry right now? Who should I be reading? They all said Anne Carson, who at the time I'd never heard about. But she was really bursting onto the US poetry scene in the 90s. She's born in Toronto, she's Canadian. She's born in 1950 to a banker actually, so she's from a well-to-do family. They moved around a lot. She got really into the classics when she was in high school. And by the classics, I mean Latin. Then she studied Greek. She had apparently an amazing high school Greek teacher, who really showed her what you could do with an archaic text. And her poems reflect that her parents' marriage was itself quite troubled. She had an early marriage that was quite troubled. She had a slightly lost youth.

She studied at the University of Toronto, and then she did a PhD in classics at St. Andrews. And then in the 1980s, she taught as a professor of classics at McGill University in Canada, which is one of Canada's best universities. Then she started teaching at American universities. She taught at Berkeley. She taught at Emory, University of Michigan, and then at NYU. She's actually had teaching stints at Princeton, and which is my home university. And she gave a very well regarded lecture in Classics at Princeton just last year in 2025

So that's who she is. Our second pressing question is, why have I never heard of Anne Carson before? Well, I would say it's a hallmark of the awarding of the Nobel Prize that it brings to global attention writers who are slightly under the radar. Do you think that's fair?

Jonty Claypole (3:59)

Well, if you look at the winners from the last couple of years, I think it's fair to say that the winner last year, Laszlo Krasna-Horkaj, which I've obviously pronounced wrong, is maybe a household name in Hungary, almost certainly, but it isn't in certainly in my household. So I think that is, I think it is a hallmark. Yeah, and that's because it's deliberately international. And the wonderful thing about the Nobel Prize for Literature is it often puts into the limelight writers from other parts of the world to our own writing in different languages and really pushes them onto the world stage. But even when it does go for a English language writer, it's very rarely who you might expect. So some of the most recent winners to have come from English speaking cultures include Louise Gluck, who's a wonderful poet.