American poet Louise Glück has won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Glück, 77, was honoured for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”, the Swedish Academy said.

The Nobel Prize comes with a medal and a prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million).

Key points about the winner:

• Glück was born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a professor of English at Yale University. 

• She made her debut in 1968 with ‘Firstborn’, and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature.

• She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection ‘The Wild Iris’, and the National Book Award in 2014 for ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’.

• Glück has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry. All are characterised by a striving for clarity. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her.

• With collections like ‘The Triumph of Achilles’ (1985) and ‘Ararat’ (1990) Glück found a growing audience in the US and abroad.

• In her essays Glück cites the urgent tone in Eliot, the art of inward listening in Keats or the voluntary silence in George Oppen. But in her own severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith she resembles more than any other poet, Emily Dickinson, the Academy said. 

Earlier controversies surrounding the prize 

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.

The Academy later announced changes it billed as improving the transparency of the awards process. But one of the literature laureates announced last year, the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke, had drawn wide international 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.

The Academy defended that choice as being made solely on literary merit without political considerations.

The 2016 literature prize granted to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan sharply divided opinion over whether a popular musician should be given an award that had been largely the domain of novelists and playwrights.

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