The poet was known for austere writing that touched on mythology and the universal human experience.
American poet and 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Gluck reportedly died of cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Gluck was the 2020 Nobel laureate in literature, the 16th woman to win the award. Her idols included other winners of the same prize, such as William Butler Yeats and TS Eliot . Her 2020 Nobel prize, which she received at home when the ceremony was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, honoured her for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
She was also the winner of a National Book Award in 2014 for her collection “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” and served as the US Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004. Her collections “The Triumph of Achilles” and “Ararat” addressed “almost brutally straightforward images of painful family relations,” the jury said, noting that her use of a “deceptively natural tone is striking,” with “no trace of poetic ornament.”Gluck was also a “poet of radical change and rebirth,” her work often marked by “humour and biting wit,” the jury added.
In her 1990 poem “Lost Love,” she wrote, “My sister spent a whole life in the earth. She was born, she died. In between, not one alert look, not one sentence.”“My interactions with the world as a social being were unnatural, forced, performances, and I was happiest reading. Well, it wasn’t all that sublime, I watched a lot of television and ate a lot of food, too.”