Anne Carson receives the 2025 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award
Anne Carson was born in 1950 in Toronto. She studied classical philology, which she later taught for many years. Her writing, while in constant dialogue with tradition, is deeply contemporary in its language, imagery, and the issues it addresses. In an extraordinary way, she explores the nature of love and desire, pain and loss, death and the passage of time. Most of her major works have been published in Polish, including Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, Eros the Bittersweet, and Decreation. Still awaiting translation is her extraordinary work Nox—a poem, a collection of fragments, notes, translations, a visual art piece, and above all, an elegy for her brother. Anne Carson’s work, deeply rooted in a dialogue with the great literary tradition—from Homer and Sappho to the twentieth century—naturally resonates with the writing of Zbigniew Herbert, who likewise sought a spiritual connection with classical Europe and persistently questioned the role of the individual within history.
