Anne Carson
“On the morning of 8 October I was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea and a cracker, reading the London Review of Books. I noticed the floor needed a little sweeping, so I put down my tea and got up. Just at that moment the phone rang. The floor never got swept. The calls kept coming one after another, and I kept cutting them off. When the phone rings I usually switch it off. Then my husband, Robert Currie, answered it, and he got me to call back. The whole thing seems a bit mad.” That is how this year’s Nobel laureate Anne Carson described her feelings.
The Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy announced the winner on Thursday, in recognition of bold and inventive literary work.
In an interview soon after the announcement, Carson said she was not writing when the Nobel committee called, but thinking about sweeping the floor. It all happened at her house by the sea.
Carson, 76, is the third Canadian writer to win the Nobel Prize, after Saul Bellow in 1976 and Alice Munro in 2013.
Asked what the prize means to her, she said she had already started planning how to spend the prize money. A friend of hers needs a house, and she always gives a large donation to Doctors Without Borders; she plans to do something like that again.
She also gave some advice to emerging writers, and a suggestion for readers curious about her work: “Find the middle and start from there.”
Carson was born in Toronto, Canada, on 21 June 1950. Her writing draws on ancient Greek literature and myth. Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, came out in 1986, but her best-known work is Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse published in 1998 and inspired by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus. In 2001 she became the first woman to win the T S Eliot Prize, for her collection The Beauty of the Husband. She has also held Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.
Navi Pillay
Another woman has won a Nobel Prize this year. The noted South African human rights advocate Navi Pillay has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to establishing international law and to world peace.
Speaking to journalists, Pillay said she first thought it might be a joke. As a lawyer and a judge, she wanted to check.
She said she had been praised for her courage after publishing a report on Gaza, but what surprised her was why it should take courage to tell the truth.
Pillay also joked a little about the prize. “If you clap a bit more, I might share this prize with Trump,” she said. Her remark is being read as a reference to Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the Peace Prize in 2025. After winning last year Machado said she wanted to share the prize with US President Donald Trump, and in January this year she went to the White House and handed her Nobel Prize to him.
Pillay took up law in the hard years of apartheid and fought against discrimination. She served as a lawyer for the anti-apartheid leader and former South African president Nelson Mandela, and later became the first Black woman judge of South Africa’s High Court. She also served at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court, and as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Navi Pillay chaired the UN’s independent commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, which last year described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.
Under the government of Bangladesh’s ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina, Pillay expressed concern about the trials for crimes against humanity committed in 1971 and about the trials over the 2009 BDR mutiny.
In a statement on 6 November 2013 as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Pillay said the International Crimes Tribunal could play an important part in tackling impunity for the atrocities of 1971 and ensuring justice for the victims.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report