Read Up on Nobel Prizewinner Anne Carson

This is a big year to be an ancient Greek. First Homer became box-office gold with his Odyssey, surpassing slightly younger competitors like Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. Then some academic translators of Homer’s work became unlikely boldfaced names and social-media lightning rods. And now the Nobel prize for Literature has gone to Canadian poet Anne Carson, whose work involves lively and colloquial riffing on classical Greek texts. For instance, Autobiography of Red, her most popular and best-selling work, uses Greek mythology as a catalyst to launch Heracles into a modern setting, resulting in a quirky and deeply felt novel-in-verse about vexed young love.

Carson’s work is accessible and widely read, but it can also be heavy — her The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos chronicles a doomed relationship in painful detail through poetic lines whose alternating lengths evoke the rhythms of the tango, itself a dance of passionate connection and dramatic intensity. (She also, again, throws in a little ancient Greek stuff because why not?) And throughout her oeuvre Carson exhibits a liberating opportunism with regard to form and genre — hey, you got essay in my poem! you got poetry in my fictional narrative! — that has a freeing effect both on her readers and on writers who’ve come along since.

Practically a local — Carson spends half her time in nearby Ann Arbor — Carson manages to be both casually erudite and authentically down-to-earth; when she received the phone call about winning the Nobel, her response was “Yikes.”