Renowned American poet and Nobel laureate in literature, Louise Glück, passed away at the age of 80. Her publisher, the MacMillan imprint Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and her editor, Jonathan Galassi, both confirmed her death.
Glück was renowned for her unflinching candour and vision. She crafted unforgettable depictions of a broken and heartbreaking world using references to classical literature, philosophical musings, bittersweet memories, and funny asides. Her most renowned poem, “Mock Orange,” which questions the meaning of sex and love, spoke of trauma and disillusionment frequently in her writings.
She won a Nobel Prize in 2020, making history as the first American poet to do so since T.S. Eliot more than 70 years prior. Her “unmistakable poetic voice that, with austere beauty, makes individual existence universal” was lauded by the Nobel Committee in 2020.
From 2003 to 2004, Glück served as the nation’s poet laureate. Most recently, she taught English at Yale University and poetry at Stanford University. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection of poems titled “The Wild Iris,” which explored themes of pain, loss, and rebirth.
She also received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2008, the National Book Award in 2014, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2001, and a National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama in 2015.
In her lifetime, Glück—who was born in New York in 1943—published more than a dozen collections of poetry. Her writings were brief, frequently less than a page, and centred on the difficult truth of being human. She was also influenced by the figures in Greek mythology.
The literary community has lost a valuable talent with her passing. Future readers and poets will be inspired by her work for a very long time.