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Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of numerous poetry books, including Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021); Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), which won the National Book Award; Poems: 1962-2012 (2012), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; A Village Life (2009), which was a finalist for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, The Wild Iris (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Ararat (1990), which won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.

In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Her other awards include the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a National Humanities Medal, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She taught at Williams College, Yale University, Boston University, the University of Iowa, and Goddard College. We were saddened to learn of Louise Glück’s passing at the age of 80.

A Village Life 2010 Shortlist

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA

Judges’ Citation

In A Village Life, Louise Glück presents us with a choir of voices whose song enacts and contemplates our human quest for the very happiness that – as if instinctively – we refuse.

In A Village Life, Louise Glück presents us with a choir of voices whose song enacts and contemplates our human quest for the very happiness that – as if instinctively – we refuse. The result is a restlessness that seems never to leave us, as Glück suggests in ‘In the Café’: ‘It’s natural to be tired of earth./When you’ve been dead this long, you’ll probably be tired of heaven./You do what you can do in a place/but after a while you exhaust that place,/so you long for rescue.’ This clarity of wisdom everywhere punctuates these poems which, even as they concern restlessness, are cast in long lines shot through with imagery of pristine, archetypal simplicity producing a cinematic stillness; one thinks of the camera in a Bergman film. The tension between that stillness and the subject of restlessness produces a resonance that builds even as it shifts like thought, like the light and dark that constantly fall across the village itself. As for the village, it seems ultimately to be the human spirit itself, replete with hopes realized and dashed, dreams without resolution, memories to which we return, often enough, to our regret, and too late. A Village Life is a tour-de-force of imagination and artistry, and shows Glück putting her considerable powers to new challenges.


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