Genre-bending Canadian author Anne Carson has won the Nobel prize in literature for her playful books that fuse the classical and the modern.

Toronto-born Carson, 76, draws on ancient Greek and Roman literature for works that often blend elements of poetry, essay and fiction.

The author was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when she was notified of her win, said Ingrid Carlberg, from the Swedish Academy.

“She was very taken by surprise,” Carlberg said on Thursday (Swedish time).

Carson’s books include Eros the Bittersweet, a look at the pleasure and pain of desire in ancient Greek literature, Autobiography of Red, which is a verse novel, Men in the Off Hours, a collection of poetry and prose, and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which compares Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy.

She also has translated works of classical Greek literature that “may be regarded as independent works in their own right”, the Swedish Academy said,

They include If Not, Winter, based on poem fragments by Sappho, Sophocles’ tragic plays Electra and Antigone and Euripides’ Bakkhai.

“Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” said Anders Olsson, chair of the literature committee.

Anne Carson’s lifetime of work has been celebrated. Photo: AAP

Olsson said Carson’s juxtaposition of influences ranging from the ancient Greeks to John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Emily Bronte “leads to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and art forms”.

Carson has taught classics at several North American universities and has lived in Iceland, where she and her husband, Robert Currie, were granted citizenship in 2022.

She also has drawn on her own life for works such as Nox, which was published in 2010 and dealt with the decades-long absence and then death of her brother Michael.

Olsson called it “a creation as sculptural as it is literary, an epitaph in the form of a box containing an accordion-fold-out of pictures, letters and other written texts dedicated to her dead brother”.

It also includes Carson’s translation of an elegy by the Roman poet Catullus for his own brother.

Among her most recent work is, Wrong Norma, a 2024 a wide-ranging collection of pieces from publications including The Paris Review and The New Yorker, accompanied by Carson’s hand-drawn illustrations.

Also that year, Carson wrote in the London Review of Books about being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

She said “a symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated. Hard to describe or explain the shame of bad handwriting.”

The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

Three science awards were announced earlier this week.

The Nobel for medicine went to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works.

The physics award recognised a scientist’s efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos.

The chemistry prize recognised two scientists for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs.

This week ends with Friday’s peace prize.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced on Monday (Swedish time).

The prize money is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.7 million) per prize.

-with AAP