Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature

OV Digital Desk
3 Min Read

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Louise Glück. Source: Twitter/The Nobel Prize

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

The American poet Louise Glück was born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Apart from her writing she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. She made her debut in 1968 with Firstborn, and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. She has received several prestigious awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize (1993) and the National Book Award (2014).

Louise Glück has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry. All are characterized by a striving for clarity. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her. she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.

She is the fourth woman to win a Nobel Prize this year.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million krona (more than $1.1 million), courtesy of a bequest left more than a century ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The amount was increased recently to adjust for inflation.

The recipient was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus.

Nobel prize for physics went to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American scientist Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing.”

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