Carson attended the University of Toronto, though she dropped out twice before earning her BA, MA and PhD in Classics. A high-school encounter with a Latin instructor, who agreed to teach her ancient Greek over the lunch hour, led to her passionate embrace of classical and Hellenic literature, influences which mark her work still. She has also received the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize.Ĭarson was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1950. Her honors and awards are many, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. Always an ambitious poet whatever her topic or genre, Merkin wrote of Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, “I don’t think there has been a book since Robert Lowell’s Life Studies that has advanced the art of poetry quite as radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing.” Carson’s recent collections include Nox (2010), Red Doc> (2013), and Float (2016). Known for her supreme erudition-Merkin called her “one of the great pasticheurs”-her poetry can also be heart-breaking and she regularly writes on love, desire, sexual longing and despair.

In addition to her many highly-regarded translations of classical writers such as Sappho and Euripides, and her triptych rendering of An Oresteia (2009), she has published poems, essays, libretti, prose criticism, and verse novels that often cross genres. “In the small world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry,” wrote Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Book Review, Carson “has been cutting a large swath, inciting both envy and admiration.” Carson has gained both critical accolades and a wide readership over the course of her “unclassifiable” publishing career. Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, professor of Classics, and translator.

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