American poet Louise Gluck awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature

American poet Louise Gluck was on Thursday awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2020 “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Gluck, 77, is the 16th woman to win the prestigious prize and the first American to receive it since singer-lyricist Bob Dylan in 2016.

 Gluck — born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts — made her debut in 1968 with Firstborn, and is seen as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. Her poetry is characterised by “a striving for clarity”, as the Academy said, with a focus on childhood, family life, and close relationships between parents and siblings. “In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self,” the Academy added. 

Gluck is currently an Adjunct Professor and Rosenkranz Writer in Residence at Yale University. She had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. The literature prize has been dogged by controversy over the past several years. In 2019 the Academy exceptionally named two winners after postponing the 2018 prize in the wake of a sexual assault scandal involving the husband of one of its members. But one of the literature laureates announced last year, the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke, had drawn wide criticism over his portrayal of Serbia as a victim during the 1990s Balkan wars and for attending the funeral of its nationalist strongman leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died in detention in 2006 while awaiting trial on genocide charges at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

 Then of course, the 2016 literature prize to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan saw polarised opinion over whether a popular musician should be given an award that had been largely the domain of novelists and playwrights.

 Established by Alfred Nobel in 1895, the Nobel Peace Prize is one of six awards that also span literature, physics, chemistry, medicine or psychology, and economic sciences.