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The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the US poet Louise Glück. The Swedish Academy of Sciences, which is responsible for the selection of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the award ceremony, announced at a news conference in Stockholm on October 8th that Louise Glück was selected as the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was honored as the 16th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences said, "Glück represented the existence of individuals universally with his unpretentious, poetic voice."
Glück said in an interview with The New York Times, "I was unprepared ... and completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet… It seemed to be extremely unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life."
Glück was born in 1943 in New York, U.S. and now, she is a professor of English literature at Yale University. She has earned fame as one of the most prominent poets in modern American literature since she started her literary career in 1968 with a collection of poems called The Firstborn. As a teenager, she suffered from severe anorexia and had been under psychological treatment for seven years due to emotional confusion, and had not received normal education. However, she continued her passion for poetry and grew into a poet. Perhaps because of this, many poems express the will of life to revive itself in the midst of loneliness and pain of life. She began to gain fame not only in the United States but also around the world and won many awards with her 1986 works The Triumph of Achilles, 1990 works Ararat, and 1992 representative work The Wild Iris.
Although she has published 12 books of poetry and essays so far, she is so unfamiliar to South Korea that there doesn’t exist a single translated book.