When the Swedish Academy announced Canadian poet Anne Carson as this year's Nobel laureate in Literature, she wasn't in Toronto or New York. She was in Iceland, listening to the wind. That detail says a lot about where one of the world's most celebrated living writers chooses to spend her time.
Carson, who was born in Canada in 1950 and made her name blending classical scholarship with poetry and essays, has deep roots in the country. She has lived there part-time for years and became an Icelandic citizen in 2022. Her win gives Iceland its second Literature Nobel, following Halldór Laxness in 1955 — a gap of more than seven decades.
The Iceland connection traces back to a 2008 residency at the Library of Water in the west-coast town of Stykkishólmur, where the artist Roni Horn converted a former library into a writing space overlooking the bay. Carson has been a fixture of Icelandic cultural life ever since. In 2023 she received the Vigdís Prize, named after Iceland's former president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, honouring work in languages, culture and translation. In spring 2025 she appeared at the Reykjavík International Literary Festival, performing at Iðnó, a historic venue by the city's lake, and at a launch event for the publisher Tunglið, which released an Icelandic edition of her Proust-inspired essay The Albertine Workout that same year.
For readers new to her work, the highlights are well worth catching up on: Eros the Bittersweet (1986), her genre-bending verse novel Autobiography of Red (1998), The Beauty of the Husband (2001), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Nox (2010), her haunting scrapbook-style elegy for her brother. Her background in classics — she has taught Ancient Greek at McGill, Princeton and NYU — runs through everything she writes.
The prize itself comes with 11 million Swedish kronor and will be handed over at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.
Why should travellers care? Because literary Iceland just got a fresh reason to be on your itinerary. You can visit the Library of Water in Stykkishólmur, walk the same streets as a Nobel laureate in Reykjavík, and time a trip around the Reykjavík International Literary Festival, which draws major international writers. Bookshops like Eymundsson and the PEN-culture scene make the capital surprisingly rewarding for bibliophiles. If you've been putting off Iceland because of the crowds at the usual waterfalls, chasing its literary side is a quieter, moodier way in.
