Discover the Best Books Written by Anne Carson

Anne Carson CM (born June 21, 1950) is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor. Trained at the University of Toronto, Carson has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada since 1979, including McGill, Michigan, NYU, and Princeton. 

With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson was awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships and has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters.

Anne Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950. Her father was a banker, and she grew up in a number of small Canadian towns. In high school, a Latin instructor introduced Carson to the world and language of Ancient Greece and tutored her privately. Enrolling at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, she left twice—at the end of her first and second years. Carson, disconcerted by curricular constraints (particularly by a required course on Milton), retired to the world of graphic arts for a short time.

She did eventually return to the University of Toronto, where she completed her B.A. in 1974, her M.A. in 1975, and her Ph.D. in 1981. She also spent a year studying Greek metrics and Greek textual criticism at the University of St Andrews. Trained as a classicist and with an interest in comparative literature, anthropology, history, and the arts, Carson fuses ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek and Latin literature – writers such as Aeschylus, Catullus, Euripides, Homer, Ibycus, Mimnermus, Sappho, Simonides, Sophocles, Stesichorus, and Thucydides. 

She is also influenced by and references more modern writers and thinkers, such as Emily Brontë, Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Gertrude Stein, Simone Weil, and Virginia Woolf. Many of her books blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction to varying degrees.

First editions of Carson's eighteen books of writings (as of 2021) have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, New Directions, and the Princeton University Press in the US, by Brick Books and McClelland & Stewart in Canada, and by Bloodaxe Books, Jonathan Cape, Oberon Books, and Sylph Editions in the UK.

Eros the Bittersweet – Carson's first book of criticism, published in 1986 – examines eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain best exemplified by "glukupikron," a word of Sappho's creation and the "bittersweet" of the book's title. It considers how triangulations of desire appear in the writings of Sappho, ancient Greek novelists, and Plato. A reworking of her 1981 doctoral thesis Odi et Amo Ergo Sum ("I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am"), Eros the Bittersweet "laid the groundwork for her subsequent publications, formulating the ideas on the desire that would come to dominate her poetic output," and establishing her "style of patterning her writings after classical Greek literature."

Men in the Off Hours (2000) is a hybrid collection of short poems, verse essays, epitaphs, commemorative prose, interviews, scripts, and translations from ancient Greek and Latin (of Alcman, Catullus, Sappho, and others). The book broke with Carson's established pattern of writing long poems. The pieces include diverse references to writers, thinkers, and artists, as well as to historical, biblical, and mythological figures, including Anna Akhmatova, Antigone, Antonin Artaud, John James Audubon, Augustine, Bei Dao, Catherine Deneuve, Emily Dickinson, Tamiki Hara, Hokusai, Edward Hopper, Longinus (both biblical and literary), Thucydides, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf.

Carson delivered a series of "short talks," or short-format poems on various subjects, at the address to the University of Toronto Ph.D. graduating class of 2012. She also participated in the Bush Theatre's project Sixty Six Books in 2011, writing a piece titled "Jude: The Goat at Midnight" based on the Epistle of Jude from the King James Bible.