Louise Glück Awarded 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature

1993 Poetry winner Louise Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature this morning, joining such previous Pulitzer winners as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Bob Dylan in receiving the prestigious prize.

The Nobel committee recognized Glück for "her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." The chair of the committee, Anders Olsson, praised the poet's "candid and uncompromising" voice, which is "full of humour and biting wit."

In a statement, Permanent Secretary Mats Malm said, "the message came as a surprise, but a welcome one as far as I could tell" after contacting the poet, who served as the United States poet laureate from 2003-2004.

Born in 1943, Glück was raised in the Long Island suburbs of New York City. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia without taking a degree. Currently, she is the Rosenkranz Writer in Residence at Yale University.

The Pulitzer Poetry jury that recommended Glück described her winning work, "The Wild Iris," as "a book of intense inward rapture where lyric values, pure lyric values of voice and spiritual meditation, predominate, and its appearance secures for Glück a high place indeed in contemporary American poetry."

Read the full jury report for "The Wild Iris" here.

-- Sean Murphy