The US poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature Louise Glück is dead. She succumbed to cancer at the age of 80, according to US media reports. Glück received the award in 2020 for her “unmistakably poetic voice”.
Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, is dead. The poet and essayist was 80 years old. The cause of death was cancer, the New York Times reported, citing Richard Deming, a colleague of Glück’s at the English department at the elite Yale University.
Difficult childhood
Glück was born in New York in 1943 and grew up in Long Island as the daughter of an entrepreneur and a housewife. Her paternal grandparents were Jews who immigrated from Hungary. As a child, Glück suffered from eating disorders and psychotherapy was an important part of her life for a long time.
“I was a lonely child,” said Glück in one of her rare interviews. “My interactions with the world as a social creature were unnatural, forced, and I was happiest when I was reading.” After school she attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York. Glück, who was married twice and had a son, later taught at various universities, most recently at the elite Yale University.
emotions and thoughts
In 1968, Glück released her debut “Firstborn”. She was soon celebrated as one of the leading poets of contemporary American literature. She published collections of poetry as well as other volumes of essays and poems. Her publications in German include “Wilde Iris”, “Averno”, “Winter Recipes from the Collective” and “Loyalty and Noble Night”.
Glück’s texts are almost always about emotions and thoughts – about loneliness, family relationships, love, despair, divorce and death – often interspersed with classic ancient myths and legends. The poet’s specialty is “the very thing that only lyric poetry can do, and that is one of the most intimate, non-public things that words can do: imitating the very special music of thought,” wrote the New York Times “.
Glück’s works were influenced by, among others, Eliot, Shakespeare and Greek mythology. She questioned the bonds of love and sex, which she called the “premise of union” in her most famous poem “Mock Orange” – at times she rejected this premise. The poet was married twice and had a son. She taught at Stanford and Yale universities.
Numerous awards
She received numerous awards throughout her life. She was the Official Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress in Washington, received Guggenheim Fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award.
When she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, she became the first American poet to win the prize since writer TS Eliot in 1948. The Swedish Academy justified the selection at the time with the “unmistakable poetic voice” with which happiness makes “individual existence universal with austere beauty.” Glück’s voice is “sincere, uncompromising and signals that this poet wants to be understood. But it is also a voice full of humor and biting insight,” the statement said.