The call came while she was in Iceland, listening to the wind. By the time Anne Carson picked up the phone, the Swedish Academy was already telling the world that the 76-year-old Canadian poet, essayist, translator and classicist had just won the single biggest prize in literature.

Her reaction, delivered to Icelandic broadcaster RÚV, was not exactly a victory speech.

"CRAZY. I THINK THEY'RE ALL CRAZY."

The Academy was rather more composed. It honored Carson "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, creates new forms for contemporary literature," according to the official citation reported by Al Jazeera. Permanent Secretary Ingrid Carlberg said Carson "was very taken by surprise" by the news.

From Toronto Classrooms to the World Stage

Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson spent decades teaching classics at universities on both sides of the border — McGill, Michigan, Princeton, NYU — before her genre-scrambling books made her one of the most-watched names on Nobel betting lists for the better part of 20 years. Her best-known work, Autobiography of Red, turns the Greek myth of Geryon into a tender, strange coming-of-age novel told entirely in verse. She has also translated Euripides and Sappho, written libretti, and in 2024 publicly disclosed she lives with Parkinson's disease.

She is only the 19th woman to win the literature prize in its 123-year history, a milestone Reuters noted in its coverage of the award. She succeeds Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, last year's laureate.

The honor lands with a 12-million-Swedish-krona purse — roughly $1.2 million — and a ceremony on December 10 in Stockholm, assuming organizers can coax their newest laureate out of Iceland, where she and her husband hold citizenship alongside her native Canadian passport.

Carson's win was the fourth Nobel announced this week, after medicine, physics and chemistry, with the peace prize still to come. Celebrations broke out online in Canadian literary circles within minutes, with The New York Times calling her "the easiest difficult poet" — erudite enough to unsettle, accessible enough to love.

For a writer who has spent a career blurring the line between ancient tragedy and modern confession, the Nobel's own verdict reads almost like one of her lines: bold, inventive, and not entirely expected — least of all by her.