American poet Louise Gluck wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Stockholm: American poet Louise Gluck was on Thursday awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2020 "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal".

The New York-born Gluck, 77, is the 16th woman to win the prestigious prize and the first American to receive it since singer-lyricist Bob Dylan in 2016.

Currently an Adjunct Professor and Rosenkranz Writer in Residence at Yale University, she had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

She has won many major literary awards in the United States, including the National Humanities Medal, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize, among others. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.

Glück is often described as an autobiographical poet; her work is known for its emotional intensity and for frequently drawing on myth, history, or nature to meditate on personal experiences and modern life.

In her work, Glück has focused on illuminating aspects of trauma, desire, and nature. In exploring these broad themes, her poetry has become known for its frank expressions of sadness and isolation. Scholars have also focused on her construction of poetic personas and the relationship, in her poems, between autobiography and classical myth.