Nobel Prize in Literature 2020: American poet Louise Glück won an award for her unmistakable poetic voice

The Nobel Prize for Literature 2020 has been awarded to American poet Louise Glück on Thursday after several years of scandals and controversy for the world’s pre-eminent literary accolade.

The prize was reported in Stockholm by Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. Making the declaration, the Twitter handle of the Nobel Prize shared, “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’.”

Born in 1943, Louise Glück is a poet and essayist. Her first collection named Firstborn was commended by literary pundits. However, it was her second collection The House on Marshland in 1975 which truly settled her as an imposing literary figure. Gluck has been reliably composing poems, reacting to the times we live in with her composed word.

The Nobel Prize for Literature has been mired in debate for a while now. A report in AP affirms this. “In 2018 the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, the secretive body that chooses the winners, and sparked a mass exodus of members. After the academy revamped itself in a bid to regain the trust of the Nobel Foundation, two laureates were named last year, with the 2018 prize going to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke. Handke’s prize caused a storm of protest: a strong supporter of the Serbs during the 1990s Balkan wars, he has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.”

Some facts about Louise Glück

1. In one of Literature Laureate Louise Glück’s most commended collections, ‘The Wild Iris’ (1992), she portrays the wonderful return of life after winter in the poem ‘Snowdrops’.

2. The American poet Louise Glück – awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature – was born in 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

3. Aside from her writing, she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

4. Louise Glück looks for the universal, and in this, she takes motivation from legends and classical motifs, present in most of her works.

5. The voices of Dido, Persephone, and Eurydice – the deserted, the punished, the betrayed – are masks for a self in change, as personal as it is universally valid.

6. Louise Glück isn’t just connected with by the wrongdoings and moving conditions of life, she is additionally a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is produced using a deep sense of loss.

7. In one of her most commended assortments, collections Wild Iris (1992), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, she portrays the supernatural return of life after winter in the poem “Snowdrops”.