The book that unfolds like an accordion

This week, Anne Carson won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. She's the writer who made a book that unfolds like an accordion: a family album, a goodbye to her brother, and a poem two thousand years old.

Carson remembers a Latin teacher who offered to teach her Greek during lunch. She became a classicist, once even tried designing cereal boxes, and at 42 published her first book of poems. Then her brother Michael died, and she made a scrapbook of memories that she didn't expect to publish. As she tells it, the one-of-a-kind original vanished for three years. A rough photocopy finally showed how to print it: Nox, a folded strip in a box. The Academy honours her whole body of work, not Nox alone. When the news came, she was reading in her kitchen in Reykjavík.