A Late-Blooming Nobelist Who Hates the Spotlight
October 21, 2026
Three weeks ago, the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Upon learning of the prize, Carson said “Yikes.”
It was that single word, more than all the paeans to her “bold and inventive oeuvre,” that made me want to know her. The woman, as much as the poet: beautiful to the bone, but not gussied up; dressed often in menswear; her delivery dry, cool, amused at her own foibles. I gathered video and print interviews, then combed through her prose and poetry with building interest, eager for bits of self-revelation.
She does not give it easily. “There’s too much self in my writing,” she once complained—in writing. She has spent years trying “to avoid having a self by moving from one definition of it to another,” she told Will Aitken in a 2004 interview for The Paris Review. “To avoid being captured in one persona.”
Nor does she hold forth, soaking in the limelight and attention. She has taught for decades at the University of Michigan, the structure and requisite conversation “contributing to sanity.” As a result, she has a tendency to lecture—but knows “that’s really tedious.” Onstage for readings, she prefers to be off center, and she often enlists her husband to do something people can look at while she reads, like rearranging cardboard boxes. In a video interview, asked to stand and read, she pales. Out there, alone? She begs to stay seated with the interviewer.
I am not sure if this is just a natural reserve or she is disappointed in herself. She is far too smart and clear to not realize how good she is. But the nature of true art is to remain anxious anyway, worried each time about meeting one’s own standards. Carson is relentless in this. She tells Aitken that in “The Glass Essay,” she feels she failed. “I still don’t think I finished the thinking.” She says she typed out Autobiography of Red as prose, first, “but it just sounded stupid—all tangled in on itself.”
He teases her about a line in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”: “I want to be unbearable.” It is accurate, she says. “I don’t actually know what it is to be unbearable, but I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they’re both charmed by the person or the writing, and also flatly terrified…. I think that’s why sometimes I am spooky to people. Because this glare is mixed with an infantile charm that disarms. And they have to deal with both.”
They also have to deal with what her sensitivity reveals about their denial. After a blissful morning swimming in the ocean, Carson reads of refugees’ despair and wonders “what sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side.” Later, in an interview, she phrases the question more casually: “How can we read the paper and go make toast?” Moral dilemmas of this sort never dissolve. “We live in doubt about whether we can ever possibly be good people.”
She does, at least. Me, I hold the bliss and the pain in separate compartments, refusing to let what I cannot control darken my life. And is that humility or cold indifference?
I suspect the latter. Carson’s brand of humility, on the other hand, feels real. She started life inauspiciously, the daughter of a housewife and a banker, and she quietly chose to study the ancient Greeks. “They, too, understood otherness and valued it,” she would say later. “That is what the god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it bounces you out of yourself.”
Carson wrote poetry but was reluctant to call herself a poet. She drew, too, and found that scarier, “more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing. [Writing] doesn’t gather up my being the way making an object does.”
So why write, Aitken asks.
“I want to find out what I think about something.”
Not until Carson was forty-two did a tiny Canadian press publish her first book of poems. That broke the ice. A few years later, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, then the Pushcart Prize, then a lucrative MacArthur Fellowship. “I think I bought some socks,” she recalls. “Socks and a new pillowcase.” The prize “doesn’t make a lot of difference,” she insists. “It’s nice to be met at airports”—but you lose something, too. “I’m not sure anybody really thinks about judging me the same way as before. There isn’t a blank space in which the judgment happens, there’s a ready-made space, a judgment already there that you either live up to or don’t.” Before, her work was dismissed as bewildering; now, she said, “I can’t do anything wrong, but which really means people are offering equally blind judgments of the work…. I guess people are just afraid to think.”
A Nobel will only exacerbate this.
Yikes.
Meanwhile, Carson is dealing with Parkinson’s disease, which has stolen her elegant cursive penmanship. She always looked especially forward to the S’s, all those curves, and for decades she thought in longhand. You can tell she feels cut adrift by these tremors: typing is not conducive to musing, and “printing isn’t much fun.” Briskly, though, she goes on. She boxes to keep her coordination, for example. A few weeks into a new class, she told an interviewer that her classmates did not seem to read at all, and that she could have been an arrogant academic judging them uninteresting, but instead she came to know and enjoy them. Her point? That “attention to detail leads you somewhere truer than generalizing.”
Carson has a gift for noticing, and capturing, the nuances of human nature. In “The Day Antonioni Came to the Asylum,” she writes of a room that turns “swoony”: “A suddenly arriving beautiful man will not so much fool people as keep them awake—drunk with our own awakeness we rushed around doing his bidding.”
She pays equally close attention to landscape, weather, and the objects of daily life—a new shade of Essie nail polish makes its way into a New Yorker poem, and a blue-patterned china platter of bread is placed “in a shaft of sunlight, and the white bread shone, in its own piety….. No one ate the white bread. It wasn’t there to be eaten. It was a chapter of civilization.”
Studying the ancients, she has read many of those chapters. She writes of the dream place Homer’s souls pass on their way to Hades, wondering how it works. “Is it a big file catalogue with all the dreams waiting in alphabetical order to go appear inside some head at night? Or standing around easy with drinks and anecdotes? Or so bored with signifying they’re lying on the ground in heaps? Do they have a gift shop? Does it sell books by Adorno? Are there factions and animosities and a row of chairs like an audition? A smell of sweat? Exhaustion and tears? Or is it blissful, beyond meaning, barefoot, organized by gentle bells? Do they have to practice all the time to keep in dream shape or is it like having perfect pitch?”
Her mind never stops. Like Keats, she has the restless leg syndrome common to insomniacs. And she writes with almost painful acuity about aging. “So, your life. There it is before you—possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map.” You begin to make choices. Consequences, like Sartre’s baggage, pile up. “Then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not.”
Already, at sixty-five, I glimpse that doorway daily—but never would have thought of the metaphor, ominous and mysterious, warning and welcoming in exactly the right proportion. Elsewhere, she takes us back a few decades to see where the process began: “We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken…. We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.”
In Glass, Irony and God, she addresses the complexity and confusion that maturity brings:
Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young
there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands
occasionally disappear—
In that Paris Review interview two decades ago, she was already “bumping up against the fact that you die alone. You think about that from time to time all through life, and it continues to make no sense against all the little efforts you make to be happy and have friends and pass the time.”
Having friends was not always easy. Canadian bankers are transferred to a new town every three years, to better learn the system. That put Anne in a new school every three years, and over time, she began to be more “gingerly” about making friends. “At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.”
Aitken inserts, “You would be well on the road to enlightenment if you were a Buddhist.”
“Instead, I’ve avoided enlightenment resolutely.”
In high school, though, she did make a few friends who shared her fascination with Oscar Wilde. He was her “education in aesthetic sensibility, and also a kind of irony toward myself that was useful in later life—an ongoing carapace of irony.” But not until midlife did she find “friends I could relax around and be just as weird as I wanted to be.”
Carson is coolly honest about relationships. “It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together,” she writes in Plainwater. And this bit of dialogue brought me up short: “‘I suppose you do love me in your way,’ I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. ‘And how else should I love you—in your way?’”
The mistake we all make. Someone mushier would bring up “love languages.” Here is Carson’s version: “Language is what eases the pain of living with other people”—and, with a razor-sharp comma splice, “language is what makes the wounds come open again.” She is philosophical there but raw elsewhere: “Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.”
In a different piece, she wrote, “Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried, Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.” Not all, though. Who would guess that this woman—who says she often has not felt quite like a woman, but not like a man either, and whose carapace of irony would make coexistence a daily challenge—has been long and well married? Her husband, a sculptor, thinks in three dimensions, she says, while she thinks in sentences. He rounds her, then, and she moves them forward.
Still, much of her work has a sadness to it. “Beauty makes me hopeless,” she writes. “…. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.” She is far too feisty to stay glum, though. In “The Anthropology of Water,” she demands, “What are we made of but hunger and rage?”
Another fact you might not guess: every Sunday, she stands and sits and kneels at a Catholic Mass. Not because she thinks it the one true faith; her Catholicism is her mother’s and her grandmother’s, nothing more. “This tradition that carries us is just an accidental vessel. I could have been a Muslim and been equally confused, I’m sure.” Nor does she agree with the doctrine—it often makes no sense, she remarks—or find the liturgy beautiful; its modern translation is “rather unattractive.” But “no matter how brainless the sermon, there is a space in which nothing else is happening so that thinking about God or about the question of God can happen.”
“Do you think of yourself as being particularly devout?” Aitken asks.
“No, I think of myself as being particularly baffled.”
“Do you think of yourself as having a relationship with God?”
“No. But that’s not bad…. I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available.” The divine is “not a being of a kind that would fit into our availability.”
Poetry such as hers, though, can carry sparks of truth straight to us.
