One of the world's most celebrated writers, Anne Carson has remarkably little to say about herself. Her author biographies stick to the bare essentials: Canadian. Poet. Essayist. Translator of Greek.
Even winning the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature prompted little in the way of revelation. Reached by organizers , she described her writing as "inadvertent" and offered the following piece of advice: "Start in the middle."
"Sorry I'm not being very dramatic for you," she said from her home in Reykjavík, adding that she planned to celebrate with a retreat into the woods to "hear the quiet."
The elusiveness is no public performance, according to those who crossed paths with Carson during her three degrees at the University of Toronto and beyond. Carson, they say, is exactly as she reads: erudite yet unpretentious, deadpan and deeply felt, saying as much with silence as through words.
"There is no Carson persona. There is Anne Carson - and that Anne Carson happens on the page and in front of people," says Sean Gurd, who studied under Carson at McGill University and is now the Floyd A. Cailloux Centennial professor in classics at the University of Texas at Austin.
"There's a mystic element to her work, and I think one way to be a mystic is just to be the way you are."
A quiet brilliance
On the page, Carson is notoriously tough to pin down. Her body of work spans more than 20 titles that often collapse the bounds between poetry, criticism, essays, translations, art and scholarship.
While she forged a voice that is unmistakably her own, the imprint of her U of T training is evident, particularly in her early works, says Gurd, pointing to influences such as Leonard Woodbury and Emmet Robbins.
"It's clear where she's from. She's from the University of Toronto department of classics," adds Gurd, who earned his PhD at U of T at Carson's encouragement.
"One of the things about Carson is there is no hidden meaning … I think that lack of mystery, which in itself is very mysterious, is something you also find in Woodbury's and [Robbins's] work - which is that it seems to sing. It has a poetry about it, but no mystery to it."
Carson enjoyed a long and winding trajectory at U of T . First enrolling in St. Michael's College in 1968, Carson dropped out at least once before earning her bachelor's degree in 1974. She later went on to complete two graduate degrees in the classics - a master's in 1975 and a PhD in 1981.
Brad Inwood first intersected with Carson while taking undergraduate courses at Brock University. He remembers a quiet student, but when she chose to speak, he says, her insights stunned her classmates and professors.
"She was a brilliant student, but not the sort who was always impatient to say something, and I think that kind of restraint is something that her public persona since has borne out," says Inwood, a U of T University Professor emeritus who completed both his master's degree and PhD at the university - and is currently a professor of philosophy and classics at Yale University.
"There was always a sense that she had a much richer inner intellectual life that wasn't always put out there in the world explicitly."
From 'revolutionary' scholar to literary giant
That brilliance took shape in Carson's scholarship.
Alison Keith, a University Professor of classics, calls the future Nobel laureate's doctoral dissertation, later adapted into 1986's Eros the Bittersweet, as "utterly revolutionary in its time."
Carson held fast to her classical roots even as she gained prominence in literary circles - all while continuing to upend convention. When Keith was president of the Classical Association of Canada , she invited Carson to deliver a plenary lecture that turned into a "full-on multimedia installation," complete with lights and colleagues carrying banners around the room.
Carson also proved to be an "otherworldly" force in the classroom, Keith says, with a reputation for inspiring students to devote themselves to the classics.
"There is something about Anne," she says. "She really walks a few inches off the ground. She has that aura."
Gurd counts himself among the converted. "I'm in the field because of her, and generations of people are in the field because of her."
As a student in her class, Gurd recalls watching closely for a glimpse of the woman behind the words only to find they were one and the same.
"[She was] funny sometimes without your even noticing … and also just charismatic by being utterly unpretentious," he says. "I think of it as a lack of reverb. Everything just sort of sits."
A typical assignment: Translate the Greek tragedian Aeschylus as though you were modernist American poet Gertrude Stein. She asked for the impossible, says Gurd, and in doing so, forced students to be creative.
For a long time, Gurd tried to work out how Carson transformed her influences into something entirely her own. He could easily name them - Greek literature, modernist English poetry, the avant garde - but couldn't grasp how she assembled them into such "explosive" work.
"I decided that the reason I couldn't figure out what she was doing was that all she was doing was being herself," Gurd says. "There was nothing to figure out."
