The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
The prize was announced in Stockholm by Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
According to the Academy, Glück “seeks the universal, and in this, she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.”
Her 2006 collection Averno was a “masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into Hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death”.
Other literary awards she has won include the National Humanities Medal, Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris, National Book Award in 2014, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize.
In 2019, Austrian novelist Peter Handke and Polish author Olga Tokarczuk were named Nobel Prize Winners for Literature in 2018 and 2019.
