LONDON — American poet Louise Glück on Thursday won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the world's preeminent literary accolade.
The committe praised Glück for her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Glück was born in New York in 1943 and is the author of numerous books, including most recently, "Faithful and Virtuous Night." She won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for "The Wild Iris," and is currently writer-in-residence at Yale University.
Glück will take home the 10 million Swedish kronor prize (over $1.1 million) along with a gold medal, courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
The Nobel Prize for Literature has had a rocky few years. In 2018 the award was postponed after sexual abuse allegations mired the Swedish Academy, the secretive body that chooses the winners, and sparked a mass exodus of members.
The academy took a one year hiatus and revamped itself in a bid to regain the trust of the Nobel Foundation. Last year it awarded Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and Austrian writer Peter Handke the delayed 2018 and 2019 prizes respectively.
Handke's prize caused a storm due to his support for Serbia during the 1990s Balkan wars. Several countries including Albania, Bosnia and Turkey boycotted the Nobel awards ceremony in response, and a member of the committee that nominates candidates for the literature prize resigned.
This year's award seems more harmonious.
Previous winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature include writers Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Bob Dylan, Wole Soyinka and Kazuo Ishiguro.
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On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine for discoveries related to the liver-ravaging Hepatitis C virus. Tuesday's prize for physics honored breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes, and the chemistry prize on Wednesday went to female scientists behind a powerful gene-editing tool.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
