Nobel-winning poet Louise Gluck dies at 80

• Louise Gluck, a renowned poet who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, has died at the age of 80.

• Born in New York in 1943, Gluck became the 16th woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.

• She was honoured with the Nobel for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal

• She was a professor of English at Yale University. 

• Her poems were often brief, less than a page.

• Childhood, family life, relationships and death were recurring themes in her collections.

• Gluck resembled 19th-century US poet Emily Dickinson in her severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith.

• 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’.

• She served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003-04 and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barrack Obama in 2015.

• Gluck 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, was a thematic that remained central with her.

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

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