Anne Carson

Canadian poet and scholar Anne Carson was the third writer in residence

Anne Carson is a professor of Classics, poet, translator and essayist. Born in Toronto in 1950, she studied to PhD level at that city’s university and saw her first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, published by Princeton University Press in 1986. Notable verse works thereafter include Autobiography of Red (1998), a reworked part of the Herakles legend based in modern times, and The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), a verse novel set around the breakup of a marriage. Her translations have taken in the work of Euripides (2006’s Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides) and Aeschylus (2009’s Another Oresteia).

Literary awards received by Carson include four Q Spell Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a T.S. Eliot Prize, a Griffin Poetry Prize and an LA Times Book Critics Award. Carson was recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2000 and is currently Distinguished Poet in Residence at New York University. Critics have described her as “unclassifiable” and “one of the most idiosyncratic intelligences at work in contemporary literature”.