American Jewish poet Louise Glück won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” said the Nobel Committee on Thursday.
She is just the fourth U.S. poet and the 16th female to receive the prestigious award since it was started in 1901.
Briefly addressing reporters outside her home in Cambridge, Mass., Glück, 77, said she felt “agitation, joy, gratitude.”
A native of New York City and with Russian and Hungarian Jewish roots, Glück is a former U.S. poet laureate who “had already received virtually every honor possible for a poet, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award in 2014 for Faithful and Virtuous Night, and a National Humanities Medal in 2015,” according to The Associated Press.
Glück wasn’t the only Jewish recipient of a Nobel Prize this year.
Harvey J. Alter was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for assisting with the discovery of the hepatitis C virus.
