Louise Glück won Nobel Prize for literature 2020

Stockholm: Louise Glück is awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature 2020. The 77 years old is the second American to win the award since Bob Dylan in 2016 – “for her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Gluck is also the second woman poet in history to win a Nobel in literature after the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska.

Who is Louise Glück ?

Glück is a well-known American contemporary poet and a professor of English at Yale University.  She wrote her first collection of poetry, Firstborn (1968) when she was a teenager and published it at age of 25. Firstborn gained favourable reviews for the poet’s unique style, marked by an economy of words and emotion. The House on Marshland was her second poetry collection which helped her gain the title of poet.  She has 12 collections of poetry in her name including Descending Figure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), The Wild Iris (1992) and The Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014).

Gluck poems are basically centered around the inner lives of individuals — on separation, loss, death and loneliness and the impact of frayed childhoods and family lives on them. The critics have compared her work to that of Rainer Maria Rilke and Ezra Pound. However, Glück herself happens to be  influenced by  Puerto Rican-American poet, writer, and physician William Carlos Williams and American poet George Oppen on her work.

Glück born in 1943 in New York City, Glück spent much of her childhood and adolescence in trying to win her mother’s approval. Her poems are an impression of her own life. That would prove a fulcrum in her poetic career.

For instance, writes Glück in Mother and Child (2001, The Seven Ages).

Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant ?

Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;

 It is your turn to address it, to go back asking

What am I for? What am I for?

Earlier, Glück has won several Guggenheim fellowships, she has won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award in 2014 for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize in 2001, and a host of other awards.