The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to American poet Louise Glück, “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Louise Glück has previously won many awards, including the National Humanities Medal and the Pulitzer Prize, she was also Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003 – 2004.
Her work explores themes of family, relationships, loss and trauma and is often influenced by classical works. The Academy especially highlighted her 2006 collection, Averno.
Louise is one of twelve laureates who were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2020.
You can watch an interview with Louise Glück below!
Averno
Poems
Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. "Averno" is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What "Averno" provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring present.
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