Louise Gluck wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
Louise Gluck, a US Poet has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. She was recognised for “her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence Universal” said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award.
Gluck born in 1943, in New York, lives in Massachusetts, and a professor of English at Yale University.
She is the fourth woman to win the prize for literature since 2010, and only the 16th since the Nobel Prize was first awarded in 1901. The last American to win was Bob Dylan in 2016.
Gluck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris and the National Book Award in 2014. Her other honours include the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry the Wallace Stevens Award given in 2008, and a National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2015.
This is a poem called Snow Drops by the brilliant Louise Gluck. The best poem about recovery, which focuses on the painful reality of being human, dealing with themes such as death, childhood, and family life. She also takes inspiration from Greek mythology and its characters such as Persephone and Eurydice who are often victims of betrayal. Her 2006 c0lelction Averno was a “masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into Hell in the captivity of Hades, the gods of death”, the Academy said.
Anders Olsson, the chair of the Nobel Prize committee, praised the Gluck’s candid and uncompromising voice, which is full of humor and biting wit and said “Her 12 collections of poetry are “characterised by a striving for clarity, severity, and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith”, he added