This year she was one of the favorites to win the world’s most coveted literary prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature. The predictions were not mistaken: Anne Carson has earned the prestigious recognition.
Born in Toronto in June 1950, Carson trained as a classicist: “When I was in the final year of high school, my Latin teacher offered to teach me how to read ancient Greek during lunch breaks, Sappho in particular. It was the start of the best lunches of my life,” she told La Lettura of the Corriere della Sera in 2020. Delving into the study of classical meter and Greek philology, not surprisingly, during her career she has translated Aeschylus, Catullus, Homer, and more.
At the same time, her body of work succeeds in uniting references from the past and tradition with innovation and creativity; it is no accident that the Swedish Academy justified this victory by speaking of a “playful dialogue” that “gave life to new forms for contemporary literature.”
Author of over 20 works, many of which have been published and translated also in Italy, Carson – named a member of the Order of Canada in 2005 – can boast the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General’s Award for poetry in English, and the PEN/Nabokov Prize.
Undoubtedly, she is not a writer known to the general public. That’s why we have prepared this selection dedicated to her books, among verse and prose works, in order of publication in Italy, where she is currently published by Crocetti, La Nave di Teseo, Tlon and Utopia.
Anne Carson: Her Books
Autobiography of Red
The first book by Anne Carson to appear in our country is Autobiography of Red, published in 2000 by Bompiani and reissued in 2020 by La Nave di Teseo. At its center is the figure of the 14-year-old Geryon, a gawky boy with vermilion skin who, together with Heracles, will encounter sex, pain, change, rage, desire, and jealousy. Born from ancient Greek fragments, Geryon finds new life within Anne Carson’s pages, in a parallel universe where the voices of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Saint Augustine resonate. Regarding the encounter with ancient Greek culture, in a 2021 interview with Vanity Fair, the author said: “Greek words seemed like little films full of history, phenomenology, and references.”
Anthropology of Water
In 2010, instead, it is the turn of The Anthropology of Water (Donzelli, edited by Antonella Anedda, Elisa Biagini, Emmanuela Tandello). A series of texts that unite “the rhythm of poetry and the concreteness of prose,” which is hardly easy to classify by genre. The starting material, in fact, is varied: diary pages, travel notes, essays and short stories… Carson reflects on the power and transformative capacities of language, giving readers a demonstration. Within, the Canadian author addresses many themes, from relationships to human impotence.
The Albertine Workout
Among the Italian publications of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature is also The Albertine Workout (published by Tlon, translated by Giulio Silvano) which gathers 59 poetic fragments from the Toronto-based writer. At the center is the figure of Albertine, Marcel’s great love, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time. The publisher defines this collection (with the English text on the facing page) as capable of revealing a “mystical perplexity.”
Economy of the Unlost
In 2020, the then-new publishing house Utopia published Economy of the Unlost (translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli), about which we published an excerpt. Demonstrating Carson’s strong ties to ancient tradition, in this work she draws a parallel between the lives of the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (who lived between the 6th and 5th centuries BCE) and the 20th-century Romanian poet Paul Celan.
Eros the Bittersweet
Also for Utopia, in 2021 appeared Eros the Bittersweet (translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli): a “metaphor about love” transformed into a dialogue that flows within the history of literature. Included within are references to classical figures such as Sappho and Catullus, and more modern writers like Virginia Woolf and Friedrich Nietzsche, or Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka. At its center, then, life, love, and reflection on the importance of this feeling in our existence. To learn more, we recommend our dedicated article.
A Cloud Was
Among Carson’s books, we also find A Cloud (Croccetti, translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli). Inspired by some of Euripides’s writings, the Canadian essayist, poet, and teacher offers an alternative reading of the myth of Troy. The publisher defines this verse drama as “an anti-militaristic reflection, an indictment of the condition of women, a meditation on the consequences of desire and beauty.” Within, Carson interweaves the story of Helen with that of Marilyn Monroe.
The Beauty of the Husband
Always centered on love, The Beauty of the Husband was published in 2022 by La Tartaruga (translated by Chiara Spaziani), but originally released in 2001. A “text-pastiche” that recounts and reconstructs the obligatory steps of a relationship: from the first seduction to the “fury” that involves the protagonists, then to the end of the relationship and the betrayal… These are Carson’s verses that define love as a dance and a war, but also a corrupted dream. Together with Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband is regarded as one of her foundational works.
Decreation
Longino, Woolf, Beckett, Antonioni and Kant… They are just some of the figures that find space within Decreation (Utopia, translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli), a kaleidoscopic work in which Anne Carson imagines impossible dialogues but able to offer new reflections. Shorter texts alternate with longer prose, and profound themes such as life and love come together with pages of literary criticism and philosophical inquiry.
Glass, Irony, and God
And then, for those who want to get to know Carson’s poetry more deeply, there is Glass, Irony, and God (published by Crocetti in 2023, translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli). One of the most appreciated collections, in which sound becomes a tool of censorship and self-censorship, but also a means to tell one’s own story. An eclectic text, as Giuseppe Carrara describes in this article, where “reality appears filtered through a transparent screen (the glass, the light, the snow, television) that both illuminates, clarifies, alters, makes it oblique, mediated….”
Like Water
Continue this journey through Anne Carson’s books with Like Water (Crocetti, translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli), which contains a series of essays and poems, all pages marked by her unique style. Classical tradition meets modern, and Carson puts ancient poets into dialogue with fifteenth-century art, anthropology and phenomenology…
The Wrong Norma
Among the works by Anne Carson published in Italy, there is also a collection of verse and prose poetry titled The Wrong Norma (Utopia, translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli). Made up of texts of diverse nature (ranging from aphorisms to daily notes, from mythical and metaphysical references to more concrete fragments), the book evades the notion of linearity and tackles themes of identity, loss, time, and language.
Men Out of Service
We continue with Men Out of Service (Biblion, curated by Leonardo Guzzo, Antiniska Pozzi and Marco Sonzogni), first published in English in 2000 and released in Italy in 2025. The book assembles a “labyrinth of voices,” elegant and precise.
The Gender of Sound – An Exploration of Sound from a Gender Perspective
More recently, in 2026, there is The Gender of Sound – An Exploration of Sound from a Gender Perspective (published by Crocetti and translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli). The theme of sound returns in this essay, which explores the relationship between auditory perception and gender stereotypes. A work that moves between classical myths and modernity, through the figures of Gertrude Stein, Margaret Thatcher, and Sigmund Freud.
