ANNE CARSON. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER SMITH.
Anne Carson fell in love with ancient Greek as a high school student, reading Sappho with a teacher during lunch hour. In The Art of Poetry No. 88, published in issue no. 171 (Fall 2004), she recalled, “It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming.” For decades, Carson’s own work—which has invented new forms to contain unbearable experiences—has appeared to readers and writers as a similar revelation. And so it gives us great pleasure to announce that Carson will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at the Spring Revel on April 1, 2025.
Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), a work of scholarship that reinvigorated the tradition of the lyric essay, examined Sappho’s conception of eros as simultaneous pleasure and pain. Since then, Carson has ranged between poetry, prose, drama, opera, translation, and visual art, often merging these approaches to expand our sense of the possible. Autobiography of Red (1998), a bildungsroman in verse, transposes the story of Herakles and Geryon onto small-town Ontario, where Geryon, a queer teenager with “little red wings,” is destroyed and remade by desire. Each new work has found the form for its subject. The Beauty of the Husband (2001) bears the subtitle “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”; Decreation (2005) sets verse and brief philosophical essays alongside a screenplay and a three-part opera; Nox (2009), a meditation on translating Catullus and an elegy for Carson’s estranged brother, is a scrapbook printed on a single long, folded page.
As a translator, Carson has taken on the works of classical writers including Sappho and Euripides in striking, courageous ways. “I think of it as a ditch, a ditch between two roads or countries,” she said of the space a translator inhabits, in an interview published on the Review’s website about her most recent book, Wrong Norma (2024). “Some writers—Emily Dickinson would be the outstanding example—make use of that ditch within their own language.”
“Reading Anne Carson is like opening a box and finding a circus inside, trapeze swings, flights of form, a woman walking on tightrope,” says the Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson. “The atmosphere is tense with risk and song. The ancients have never felt so alive. Below, one gasps. Rogue feelings jam up against each other: awe, play, grief, longing, and wonder. I sometimes find myself repeating, the beauty of the husband, the beauty of the husband, the beauty of the husband. Those not-quite-iambs turn centuries of epithalamia upside down.”
The Review is proud to have published Carson’s writing over the years, including a trio of poems in issue no. 151 (Summer 1999). Issue no. 171 (Fall 2004) included “The Day Antonioni Came to the Asylum (Rhapsody),” and issue no. 215 (Winter 2015), “Salon.” A short story, “Eddy,” was published in issue no. 221 (Summer 2017). An excerpt from The Trojan Women, a graphic adaptation of Euripides’s tragedy, with text by Carson and art by Rosanna Bruno, appeared in issue no. 236 (Spring 2021).
Carson has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin, and she is the recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. With The Beauty of the Husband (2001), she became the first woman to receive the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is a member of the Order of Canada and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
We look forward to presenting Carson with the Hadada at the Revel, our annual gathering of writers, artists, and friends to celebrate and raise funds for the Review, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Tickets are available here. All proceeds from the event will help us continue to seek out and publish the best and most exciting new work—in print, online, and on our podcast—and to explore new ways to connect writers, artists, and readers. We hope you’ll join us.
