American poet Louise Glück, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 80, her publisher and the prestigious Yale University, where she taught, confirmed to AFP on Friday.
The New York native, considered one of the greatest figures in American poetry, was honored by the Swedish Academy in 2020 “for her distinctive poetic voice,” becoming the 16th woman to win the literary prize.
“Louise Glück’s poems express our insatiable thirst for knowledge and connection in an often unreliable world. His work is immortal,” praised his publisher Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus and Giroux in a press release to AFP.
His work, begun in the late 1960s and known for its fluid style and sublimation of the simple beauty of nature, has earned him numerous prestigious awards in the United States.
For example, his polyphonic collection The Wild Iris, published in 1992 and later translated into French, won him the Pulitzer Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the world.
In more than 50 years, the author has published around ten volumes of poetry, essays and a novel. The latter, titled Marigold and Rose: A Fiction (2022), offers a searing dive into the inner lives of very different twins.