Anne Carson was sweeping her kitchen floor at her home in Reykjavík – where she lives for part of the year – when she started receiving phone calls, which she kept turning off. But her husband encouraged her to call the numbers back. It turned out that the Nobel prize had been trying to get hold of her.
Asked how she would celebrate the honour, she said she planned to go for a walk in the woods. But how about the reaction of her longtime publisher New Directions? Publisher and president Barbara Epler tells us.
How did you feel upon hearing the news?
Walking on air and toasting; scheming about reprints and worrying about printers being so backed up.
Why is Carson so deserving of the Nobel?
JL* wrote: “She’s obviously someone to be reckoned with. She’s taken leave of the mundane world and it’s more than delightful. It’s slightly frightening. One asks oneself, have I lost the lid off my head?”
*James Laughlin (1914–1997), the New Directions founder who first brought Carson to the press in the 90s.
What has it been like to work with Carson over the course of her career?
A pleasure: she’s fun, generous, and in her dry way incredibly witty. I once said to Anne – feeling bad about dragging her to a big award ceremony, as she stood up from the table to go to the podium and accept the prize – “You’re being a really good sport.” And she turned back to reply: “That’s what they say to people walking to the guillotine.”
Which Carson title would you recommend for first-time readers?
Glass, Irony, and God.
And what do you think is Carson’s most underrated work?
The Trojan Women. (I think the comic book format stumped people, which is a pity as it is singularly brilliant and heartbreaking; plus, Helen of Troy is a fox.)
Carson has a couple of books lined up for publication in 2027. Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind, originally an LRB essay, will be published in February, and draws on “Homer, John Cage and Cy Twombly to discuss handwriting, late style, Parkinson’s disease and boxing”, says Declan Ryan, who oversees the poetry list at Carson’s UK publisher Jonathan Cape.
Meanwhile, Highlights of Colonialism, to be published in November 2027, will be an “accordion fold-out paperback artbook”, says Declan Spring, vice president and senior editor at New Directions.
Both books are “short but capacious, testament to her range of formal approaches, frames of reference and ability to gesture towards the epic, even within a potent sort of minimalism”, Ryan adds.
For more on Carson, read reactions to her win from Margaret Atwood, Yiyun Li and Édouard Louis. Plus, here’s a guide to her work.
Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
