Literature Nobel awarded to American Louise Gluck for ‘unmistakable poetic voice’; 16th woman to be feted

Literature’s most prestigious prize, the Nobel, was announced on Thursday in a low-key ceremony at Stockholm. And the winner for this year’s Nobel in Literature is American poet Louise Gluck.

In a statement released by the Swedish Academy, the poet has been recognised for her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

The 77-year-old American writer beat French Guadeloupean author Maryse Conde, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Japanese writer Haruki Murakami who were some of the big guns in the race this time. Born 1943 in New York, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Apart from her writing, her day job includes teaching English at the Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Gluck has previously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection “The Wild Iris”, and the National Book Award in 2014. The Academy while feting her said, she “seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.” It added that her 2006 collection “Averno” was a “masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into Hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death.”

With this, Gluck becomes the 16th woman in history to have won the Nobel Prize. Past winners include Selma Lagerlof in 1909, Pearl S Buck in 1938, Nadine Gordimer in 1991, Toni Morrison in 1993, Doris Lessing in 2007 and Alice Munro in 2013.

After recent years of scandals and propelling fairly-unknown names into the spotlight, the Swedish Academy on Thursday crowned the 2020 Nobel Literature Prize laureate even as literary experts hedged their bets due to the unpredictability of the exercise.

This year the race to the top was a veritable fight between some of the best writers and novelists who wrote of a pan-global experience. The chief contenders this year included Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Canadian poet Anne Carson and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

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. The academy then tried some course-correction in order to regain the trust of the Nobel Foundation.

Two laureates were named last year, with the 2018 prize going to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke. But last year’s choice of Austrian novelist Handke unleashed a flood of criticism, leaving many wondering how it could award a writer known for supporting Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkan wars and playing down his army’s atrocities. And this was not all – the Academy was reeling from bad press after the husband of one of its members was jailed for rape.

The Academy’s unpredictability in choosing winners was also evident in 2016 when it honoured US rock legend Bob Dylan.

The Nobel Prize comes with a medal and a prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million, 950,000 euros).

Normally, winners receive their Nobel from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, but the pandemic means it has been replaced with a televised ceremony showing the laureates receiving their awards in their home countries.

Still to come are prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of peace and economics.