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Poet and essayist Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. The 77-year-old will be honored “for her unmistakable poetic voice” with which she universalizes individual existence “with strict beauty,” said the academy’s permanent secretary, Mats Malm. Glück has devoted himself to the poetry of nature, among other things; in his volume “Wilde Iris”, which appeared in the United States in 1992 and only in Germany in 2008, he let flowers and snow have a voice. In “Avernus” he rewrote the ancient myth of the theft of Persephone by Hades.
Many observers expected in advance that this year’s elections would be less controversial and less European. Many also expected an award-winning woman; However, luck was not one of the favorites that was traded in the bookmakers. In Germany it is mainly known to connoisseurs, so far only two Glück books have been published here.
The American was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. He attended Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. His first volume of poetry, “Primogénito”, was published in 1968 and was praised by critics for its technical precision and disaffected language with which it addressed the personal, family and existential needs of its protagonists. Much of his early work is considered autobiographical.
Following the release of Firstborn, Glück suffered from writer’s block for a long time, which was only resolved after he began teaching at Goddard College in Vermont in 1971. He later held a professorship at Williams College for 20 years. Today she is a writer-in-residence and visiting professor of English at the prestigious Yale University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she currently resides. In the United States she is considered one of the best and most talented poets of our time. In 1993 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and in 2014 the National Book Prize.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is endowed with ten million crowns (about 950,000 euros) and is awarded by the Swedish Academy. The committee has been plagued by scandals in recent years. Among other things, a total of 18 women had filed complaints of sexual harassment against Jean-Claude Arnault, then director of a cultural forum related to the academy and husband of juror Katarina Forstenson, and Arnault was later convicted of rape. The award was canceled in 2018.
For this reason, last year two awards were awarded: to the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk and the Austrian Peter Handke. Handke’s Nobel Prize drew international criticism. The author showed his solidarity with Serbia during the wars in Yugoslavia and in 2006 gave a speech at the funeral of former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević, who had been overthrown six years earlier.
Nobel Prize winners in the scientific categories of medicine, physics and chemistry have been announced since the beginning of the week. Among those chosen was the astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, a German. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be named on Friday, followed by the Nobel Prize in Economics on Monday, which is the only one not dating back to Alfred Nobel’s will.
