Stockholm: The Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded to American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
The prize was announced Thursday in Stockholm by Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
Making the announcement, the Twitter handle of the Nobel Prize shared, “The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück ‘for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’.”
Born in 1943, Glück is a poet and essayist. Her first collection titled Firstborn was lauded by literary critics. But it was her second collection The House on Marshland in 1975 which really established her as a formidable literary figure. Gluck has been consistently writing poems, responding to the times we live in with her written word.
The Nobel Prize for Literature has been mired in controversy for a while now.
In 2018 the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, the secretive body that chooses the winners, and sparked a mass exodus of members.
After the academy revamped itself in a bid to regain the trust of the Nobel Foundation, two laureates were named last year, with the 2018 prize going to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke.
Handke’s prize caused a storm of protest: a strong supporter of the Serbs during the 1990s Balkan wars, he has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes. Several countries including Albania, Bosnia and Turkey boycotted the Nobel awards ceremony in protest, and a member of the committee that nominates candidates for the literature prize resigned. PTI

Press Trust of India