Poet and essayist, Louise Glück has made history after becoming the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature in 27 years.
Glück, who has many literary awards to her credit, was today (Thursday, October 8, 2020) declared winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize award in Literature.
The 77-year-old won the award for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Explaining how she won the keenly contested award, Anders Olsson, the chair of the Nobel prize committee, said Glück’s voice is candid and uncompromising.
According to Olsson, Glück is full of humour and biting wit, and her 12 collections of poetry, from Faithful and Virtuous Night to The Wild Iris are characterised by a striving for clarity.
“In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self,” Olsson said. “But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet.”
This new feat for Glück however makes her the 16th woman to win the award since its inception in 1901.
Her biography…
Born in 1943, Glück has written 12 collections of poetry and two books of essays. Her most recent collection was 2014’s Faithful and Virtuous Night. Over a career spanning six decades, she has explored trauma, death, and healing, in poems that scholars have argued are both confessional and not.
Glück has written about developing anorexia as a teenager, which she later said was the result of her efforts to assert independence from her mother, as well as the death of her older sister, which happened before Glück was born. While in therapy, she elected to enrol in poetry workshops over a traditional college education and began to develop her voice. She published her first collection, Firstborn in 1968.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris. She was appointed the US poet laureate in 2003 and visited the White House to receive the National Humanities Medal from former US president Barack Obama in 2016.
Written by Samiah Olabimpe
