STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Canadian poet Anne Carson, an essayist and classicist who brings a modern twist to mysticism and antiquity in her writings about love, desire and despair. The 76-year-old — who announced in 2024 that she has Parkinson's disease — was honoured "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature," the Swedish Academy said. The permanent secretary of the Academy, Ingrid Carlberg, said she had briefly spoken to Carson. "We didn't have so much time to speak. All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she's listening to the wind." "She was taken by surprise, but very happy. I could hear that in her voice." A professor of classics with a background in dead languages, literature, anthropology and history, she was described by The New York Times in 2001 as "one of the great pasticheurs." Her unique contemporary poetry earned her several key literary prizes in the 1990s, including the 1996 Lannan Award a