Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature

The Nobel Prize for Literature 2020 was awarded to the American poet Louise Glück, “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

Glück is 77 years old and one of the best known contemporary American poets. Born in New York, she has Jewish-Hungarian origins and teaches English literature at Yale University. In 1993 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with his collection of poems The wild iris; in 2014 the National Book Award, another important American literary award. He has written 12 collections of poems, as well as various collections of literary criticism essays. His tenth collection of poems was recently published in Italian at the beginning of the year, Hell, which was released in the United States in 2006. Contains a rewrite of the Greek myth of Persephone. It was published by the Dante & Descartes bookshop in Naples, which also has a small business as a publishing house.

Greek mythology in general is one of the recurring themes of his works (other characters mentioned are Dido and Eurydice, such as Persephone, betrayed women), in addition to childhood, and family relationships, in particular with parents and brothers and sisters. As the Swedish Academy explained, “she would never deny the importance of the autobiographical context in her works, but she should not be considered a confessional poet,” as are Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, for example.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is one of the most prestigious literary awards and has been awarded since 1901.

The live announcement