‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Nobel winner Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s work has long been admired among poets of many countries. For new readers, I would recommend The Beauty of the Husband – direct and visceral, funny and angry and sad – or Men in the Off Hours. Delights await!

Emily Wilson

Many congratulations to Anne Carson for the well-deserved Nobel prize! This is also great news for translation, classics, poetry, the breaking of generic and disciplinary boundaries, and the fact that you don’t have to fit a pre-existing mould to have a brilliant, successful career.

Ocean Vuong

To see the Nobel Committee honour a mind and spirit of such immense capacity and rigour gives me hope for the role of letters in our world at an hour when the vocation’s integrity is more threatened than ever before. For decades, Carson’s unapologetically erudite work has centered strangeness and mystery as methods of human revelation. And its myriad and restless formal enactments have granted endless permissions to multiple generations of writers. Like the best work out there, it fosters others as it forges new ways to be and think for itself. I count myself lucky to write in its wake.

Rebecca Perry

In 2013, I (and pretty much every writer I knew at the time) went to see Anne Carson give the Poetry Society annual lecture. She had us gripped, of course; she was generous, smart, sharp, impeccable in cowboy boots and a suit. Her person demands undivided attention. At the end, in the Q&A, a man asked a long, self-indulgent question to which she simply replied: “No.” The audience waited, briefly, for elaboration. None came.

And there lies the magic of Anne Carson – she is concurrently at play and utterly serious. She never gives many words when one will do.

For most of my writing life she has been the writer I go to for pretty much anything I need. I pick up The Beauty of the Husband and I fall in love with poetry again, I deal out the pamphlets of Float and remember that ambition and weirdness are good, I teach The Glass Essay and it shows up notions of formal boundaries as an absurdity.

She shows us that there is always, that there must be, room for risk and vision, for uncompromising writing. Poets everywhere are rejoicing.