The 2026 Nobel Prizes

Gary Arndt (0:00)

In his will, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, left most of his fortune to establish a prize, honoring achievements in various fields. Except during the World Wars, the Nobel Prizes have been given out every year, and 2026 continues this tradition. This year, the Nobel Committee awarded 10 men and women for their contributions to peace, literature, physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics. Learn more about the 2026 Nobel Prize recipients, and the work that they were recognized for, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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It's October, which means the Nobel Prizes have been announced, and once again, I'll go over each new Nobel Laureate and why the Nobel Committee has honored them. If you've been listening for a while, you know that the Nobel Prize is far from perfect. There have been prizes given out for research that's proven to be outright wrong. There have been major snubs of people who should have received a Nobel Prize, but didn't. Almost every year, most people have no clue who the recipients are, which is kind of to be expected. And every year, there's also controversy over who received the award and why.

So with that, let's turn our attention to what I think is the softest of the awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I call it the softest award simply because it feels out of place compared to the others, and it's so subjective. Moreover, the award has to consider literature from other countries and languages around the world, and I'm not even sure how any committee can do that accurately. What ends up happening is they spread the award out to writers from different countries, most of whom are older and have had careers that are known only to a country's literati. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient is Canadian Anne Carson. According to the Nobel Committee, she received the award, quote, for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature, end quote. Her most notable works include Autobiography of Red, which was published in 1998 It's a novel written in poetic verse that reimagines the Greek myth of Giron, a red-winged monster killed by Hercules, as a modern story about growing up and unrequited love. It reportedly sold at least 25,000 copies by the year 2000, which is an unusually good number for contemporary poetry.

The Beauty of the Husband was published in 2001 It's an experimental narrative about marriage, betrayal, and desire, organized as a series of poetic movements. Knox, published in 2010, is an unusual book-length elegy for her brother, presented as an accordion-fold collection of fragments, photographs, translations, and personal recollections. She didn't have the sort of commercial success of like a Stephen King, but she was successful within her niche. The funniest thing in the aftermath of her announcement is that Princeton University sent out a congratulatory tweet, as she taught there in the 1980s, and they denied her tenure. Reports are that her book sales have exploded since the announcement, which is sorted to be expected.