US poet
Nobel Prize winner for literature Louise Glück is dead
Poet Louise Glück at a ceremony honoring her with the U.S. National Humanities Medal in the East Room of the White House in Washington on September 22, 2016. photo
© Susan Walsh/AP
In 2020, the US poet Louise Glück received the Nobel Prize in Literature – and thus became known worldwide. The reason given at the time was that she had an “incomparable poetic voice”. Only three years later, Glück has now died.
The US poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature Louise Happiness is dead. That’s what the head of the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jonathan Galassi, told the German Press Agency in New York on Friday. Luck 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.
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.