LOUISE Gluck bags 2020 Nobel prize for literature

American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück has won the  2020 prestigious  Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy appreciates her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal. Poet Louise Elisabeth Glück is a professor at Yale University.  Glück,77, made her debut in 1968 with her collection titled ‘Firstborn’. She is the first American woman to win the award in 27 years, after the late novelist Toni Morrison in 1993. Glück will take home 10 million Swedish kronor (around $1.1 million) along with a gold medal, courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. She is considered one of the most prominent poets and essayists in American contemporary literature. Louise Elisabeth Glück, the granddaughter of a Hungarian Jewish immigrant on her father’s side, is widely considered one of the leading contemporary American poets, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 and named the United States poet laureate in 2003. She has also bagged  National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Bollingen Prize,  according to The Poetry Foundation. She was born on 22 April 1943 in New York. In 2003, Glück was named the 12th US Poet Laureate. That same year, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a position she held until 2010. Her book of essays Proofs and Theories (1994) was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. In addition to the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, she has received many awards and honors for her work, including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, a National Humanities Medal, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Glück is currently a writer-in-residence at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Poet Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.” In 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’’. Glück was editor of The Best American Poetry 1993. Her essay collections on poetry included Proofs and Theories (1994) and American Originality (2017).  Glück served as poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (2003–04). Her later honours included the Wallace Stevens Award (2008) and a National Humanities Medal (2015). Glück had a solid knowledge of the Greek myths by the age of three. Her father, who wanted to be a writer but eventually decided to go into business with his brother-in-law, and her mother, who admired creative gifts and appreciated the arts, encouraged Glück and her sister to develop any inclinations or talents they had in such areas, says her biography.