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Home >News >World >Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 awarded to American poet Louise Glück

The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Louise Glück on Thursday after several years of scandals and controversy for the world’s pre-eminent literary accolade.

Literature Laureate Louise Glück made her debut in 1968 with ‘Firstborn’ and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. She has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry.

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The official Twitter feed of the Nobel Prize wrote: "The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

Some facts about Louise Glück

  • In one of Literature Laureate Louise Glück’s most lauded collections, ‘The Wild Iris’ (1992), she describes the miraculous return of life after winter in the poem ‘Snowdrops’.
  • The American poet Louise Glück – awarded this year’s NobelPrize in Literature – was born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • Apart from her writing she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
  • Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.
  • The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice – the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed – are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid.
  • Louise Glück is not only engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss.
  • In one of her most lauded collections, The Wild Iris (1992), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, she describes the miraculous return of life after winter in the poem "Snowdrops":

A Louise Glück poem
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A Louise Glück poem

Back in 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, the secretive body that chooses the winners, and sparked a mass exodus of members.

Established by Alfred Nobel in 1895, the Nobel Peace Prize is one of six awards that also span literature, physics, chemistry, medicine or psychology, and economic sciences.

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