Who is Anne Carson? Nobel Prize winner's books, career and writing style explained

Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy gave her the award for her "bold and inventive" body of work. The academy said Carson creates new forms of literature by bringing classical traditions into modern writing.

Carson is the third Canadian-born writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before her, Alice Munro won in 2013 and Saul Bellow won in 1976.

One of her best-known books is Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, published in 1998. The book uses a small part of an ancient Greek poem and turns it into a story about a troubled teenager who is caught in a difficult love affair.

Carson studied at the University of Toronto. Her interest in ancient Greek and classical literature later became an important part of both her academic career and her writing. She went on to teach classics at Canadian colleges, including the University of Calgary and McGill University.

Carson published "The Glass Essay" in 1995. It is a long poem about unrequited love, or love that is not returned by another person. The work is another example of how Carson uses poetry to explore personal emotions while connecting them with literary traditions, according to the New York Times.

The collection includes poems about subjects such as Carson's father, snow and Roget's Thesaurus. There is no single clear connection between all the poems. Carson herself explained the title by saying the poems were called "wrong" because they did not have a clear link to each other.

The Swedish Academy specifically praised the way Carson creates new forms for contemporary literature. Her career shows how classical literature can be used in fresh and unexpected ways. Her books have made ancient Greek ideas accessible to modern readers while also challenging traditional ideas about what poetry and literature should look like.