The news that the poet Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel has a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy: just as some recent Nobels (like fellow poet Louise Glück, like Annie Ernaux, like Han Kang, or like the one from just the previous edition, László Krasznahorkai) constituted slight and pleasant surprises, Anne Carson's shines for its forcefulness. “Ah, right, Anne Carson,” the many thousands of readers of her verses around the world must have said. When I say that the aforementioned were “slight and pleasant surprises,” I mean that they were not entirely unexpected: they appeared in the Nobel “betting pools,” in the lists of authors nominated to receive the award, but perhaps in less visible spots on those lists. Not Anne Carson: Anne Carson had already been among the names heading them for years, and it is not out of place to imagine her, in recent years, waiting for the call from the Swedish Academy. A bit like Paul Valéry, who was among the candidates for twelve or thirteen years in a row, and every year, when the Nobel dates arrived, he would go for long walks to calm his nerves. He died without receiving it, precisely the year that the Swedish academics had decided –they said– to give it to him. Anne Carson has declared that she too will go out for a walk in the woods, but in her case “so as not to have to answer the phone; afterwards, we will enjoy the silence.”

"I have a Rosalía hangover". That is how the Canadian poet Anne Carson, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, begins the article On Rosalía, which was published in the magazine London Review of Books. In it, she describes a concert by the artist from Sant Esteve Sesrovires held in Chicago on June 20th as part of the tour for the album Lux. Carson describes in a very poetic way the effects of the music but, above all, of Rosalía's magnetic presence on stage. She is fascinated by her power to move the audience. "With every intake of breath, the whole audience, one by one, screamed as if she were running her fingernail down their spines," writes Carson. "How can someone manage to seduce twenty thousand people in this way every night, throughout a tour across who knows how many cities? I am incapable of it," explains the poet, who breaks down everything that fascinates her about Rosalía's voice.

Even though she is approaching 80 years old and Parkinson's has caused her to lose her beloved handwriting, the poetic and essayistic work of Anne Carson, 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, knows how to preserve its youth thanks to a secret that her readers know well: a mischievous, perceptive, and erudite sense of humor, without the latter implying pedantry.

For forty years, every May, verses have taken over the Palau de la Música Catalana for a night "as a gesture of delicate insurrection." Maria Callís and Manuel Forcano, directors of the Barcelona Poetry Festival, recall this in the prologue to the book that those attending the recital, punctuated by the sound and light landscapes curated by Clara Aguilar, took home after an intense hour and a half in which they were able to delve into the subtle voice of the Romanian. Ana Blandiana, in the irony of the Georgian Shota Iatashvili and also in the enigmatic Anne Carson, one of the great attractions of the evening, who has read a dozen prose poems from the distant Short talks (1992).