American poet Louise Gluck won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. According to the 7-member Nobel Committee, the Prize was given to Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Born in New York in 1943, Glück 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. Louise Glück has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry.
She has received many prestigious awards such as Pulitzer Prize (1993) and the National Book Award (2014).
She beat French-Guadeloupean author Maryse Conde, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Caribbean-American author Jamaica Kincaid, Canadian poet Anne Carson, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Hungary’s Peter Nadas and Laszlo Krasznahorkai to win the prize.
Poet and writer Rabindranth Tagore was the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize in 1913. He won the award for “his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”.
