The US poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature Louise Glück is dead. This was confirmed by the head of the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jonathan Galassi, on Friday in New York. Glück was 80 years old. The cause of death was cancer, reports New York Times citing Richard Deming, a colleague of Glück’s in the English department at the elite Yale University.
Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. The Swedish Academy justified the selection with the “unmistakable poetic voice” with which happiness makes “individual existence universal with austere beauty.” “First I panicked, then I thought I was hallucinating,” said the poet in one of her first reactions to the award. “Afterwards I felt incredibly honored.”
The poet was born in New York and grew up in Long Island. She wrote poems as a girl. After her debut “Firstborn” (1968), the current literature professor published numerous other volumes of poetry as well as several books with essays about poetry.