Fascinated by poetry since childhood, she invented a competition to honor the most beautiful poetry in the world, a prize that the Nobel jurors then awarded her in 2020: Louise Gluck, the American, awarded the highest global recognition three years ago After receiving a Pulizter and a National Book Award for her work, she died of cancer at the age of 80 at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The announcement was made by Jonathan Galassi, who edited the publication of his works in the United States for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gluck was the sixteenth woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; Before her, Bob Dylan was the last American to receive the award. When he got the call from Stockholm about winning – a check for ten million Swedish kroner, the equivalent of just over a million dollars – the first thing he thought was: “I’ll be able to buy a house in Vermont.”
The other thought was, “How can I preserve the daily lives of the people I love?” And the poet, whose literary work dealt with themes of trauma and loss, family and loneliness, had always thought: “I won’t have any friends anymore. Almost everyone is a writer.” Then, when asked what he would recommend reading to those unfamiliar with his work, he advised “not to start with his first book” (Firstborn from 1968) and perhaps start with Averno Begin, the collection based on the mother-daughter relationship, the background myth of Demeter and Persephone, published in 2006 in the USA and 2019 in Italy by the publisher and bookstore Dante & Descartes in Naples, or by Faithful and Virtuous Night in 2014.
After the Nobel Prize ceremony, his 12 volumes of poetry were purchased by the Assayer. Gluck, who won the Lerici Pea Prize in Italy last year, was born in New York. However, Vermont had held a special place in her heart: it was there, after she began teaching at Goddard College, that Louise overcame a long period of “writer’s block” and published her second poetry collection, The House on Marshland, in 1975 to critical acclaim. It was also in Goddard that Louise met her second husband, the writer John Dranow, father of her only son Noah, whom she divorced in the 1990s. Among other things, the very personal Ararat, which has its origins in the pain of his father’s death. Luise Gluck was named an award-winning poet in the United States in 2003 and 2004 (the federal position awarded to prominent literary figures charged with promoting poetry). She divided her time between Yale, where she taught, Montpelier in Vermont, Cambridge and California: l Last year she was appointed to Stanford’s creative writing department.
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