American poet Louise Glück wins 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature

American poet Louise Glück has won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million Cdn) prize, which has been given out since 1901, recognizes authors who have "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction." 

Glück was recognized for her "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

The prize was announced in Stockholm by Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.

Glück is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections.

Her first collection, Firstborn, came out in 1968. Her 1992 collection The Wild Iris won the Pulitzer Prize. Her 2015 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night won the National Book Award.

Her poetry is "characterized by a striving for clarity," often focusing on childhood and family life, and close relationships with parents and siblings, the prize said.

It noted her 2006 collection Averno, calling it "masterly" and "a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone's descent into hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death."

Her other collections include Meadowlands and Vita Nova. She released a compilation collection, Poems: 1962-2012, in 2012.

In 2003-2004, she was the poet laureate of the United States.

She was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2010 for her collection A Village Life.

Glück was born in 1943 in New York. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, but never graduated. She currently lives in Cambridge, Mass., and is adjunct professor and Rosenkranz Writer in Residence at Yale University.

She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1975 and 1987. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2015.

Her most recent book is the essay collection American Originality: Essays on Poetry, which was published in 2017.

In his will, Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel specifically designated the Swedish Academy as the institution responsible for the Nobel Prize for literature.

The winners are always announced in October and the Nobel Prizes are presented on the Dec. 10 anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

Normally, the prizes are presented in Sweden, alongside a lecture by the 2020 recipients. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lectures and the ceremony will be virtual. The 2020 laureates will be invited to the 2021 ceremony, if it is possible to do so safely.

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk  ​​​​​and Austrian writer Peter Handke were both awarded the prize last year. Two prizes were awarded, as no Nobel Prize for Literature was given out in 2018. 

Two Canadians have won the prize in the past: Saul Bellow (a Canadian-born American) in 1976 and Alice Munro in 2013.

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Other past winners include American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, Russian historian and essayist Svetlana Alexievich, Irish poet Seamus Heaney and American novelist Toni Morrison.

Nobel prizes are also given for Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, Peace and Economics.

British scientist Michael Houghton, who works at the University of Alberta, and Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus.

American biochemist Jennifer A. Doudna and the French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing the CRISPR gene editing tool.

British scientist Roger Penrose, German Reinhard Genzel and American Andrea Ghez won the 2020 Physics prize for their discoveries relating to black holes.

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The peace prize will be announced on Friday, Oct. 9.

The economics prize will be announced on Monday, Oct. 12.

With files from the Associated Press.