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Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over 30 years. She was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; was honored with the 1996 Lannan Award and the 1997 Pushcart Prize, both for poetry; and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. In 2001 she received the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry – the first woman to do so, the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor.

In 2020, Anne Carson was awarded Spain’s prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. The jury of the literature award — one of the eight handed out annually by a foundation named after the heir to the Spanish throne, said that Carson “has reached a level of intensity and intellectual solvency that place her among the most outstanding writers of the present” (as reported by CBC News.)

Red Doc> 2014 Canadian Winner

McClelland & Stewart, Canada
Finalist in:

Judges’ Citation

Anne Carson continues to redefine what a book of poetry can be….

Anne Carson continues to redefine what a book of poetry can be; this ambitious collection ranges from quatrains studded with uncanny images (‘Here lies the refugee breather/who drank a bowl of elsewhere’) to musing verse essays, personal laments, rigorous classical scholarship, and meditations on artists’ lives, caught in the carnage of history. All are burnished by Carson’s dialectical imagination, and her quizzical, stricken moral sense.

Judges’ Citation

Red Doc>, Anne Carson’s return to the characters of Autobiography of Red, stands on its own columns with pedestals in the fragments of Stesichorus’s account of Herakles’ final labor – to steal the red cattle of the monster Geryon.

Red Doc>, Anne Carson’s return to the characters of Autobiography of Red, stands on its own columns with pedestals in the fragments of Stesichorus’s account of Herakles’ final labor – to steal the red cattle of the monster Geryon. The narration puts the gaps to task. What is taken up again, more significantly than an update of Autobiography, is a daunting writer having her particular way with the language. Amid marvels of toaster-sized ice bats, barn-sized crows, and a silver-tuxedoed Hermes in humanlike form, is a dying mother’s request of the daughter to pluck the hairs from her chin. Geryon returns middle-aged, Herakles, a damaged war veteran. Sexual bent is irrelevant; nature outsized, glacial and volcanic. Words are rescued, morphed and slapped awake. Speech hurtles from vulgar to sublime. Everything accelerates except when a break is introduced disguised as riff, list or song and the mead is served in golden cups.