Authors Like Anne Carson

Alice Oswald

British · Dart (2002), Memorial (2011), Nobody (2019)

Oswald studied classics at Oxford and trained as a gardener. Dart, a book-length poem built from the voices of people who live and work along a Devon river, won the T. S. Eliot Prize. Memorial strips the Iliad down to the short lives and deaths of the soldiers who die in it. In 2019 she became the first woman elected Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Maggie Nelson

American · Bluets (2009), The Argonauts (2015)

Nelson is a poet and critic whose books move between memoir, philosophy and art criticism. Bluets is a sequence of 240 numbered propositions about the colour blue, heartbreak and a friend's injury. The Argonauts, about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and the birth of their son, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Every book by Maggie Nelson →

Louise Glück

American · The Wild Iris (1992), Meadowlands (1996), Averno (2006)

Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020; she died in 2023. Meadowlands sets the breakdown of a modern marriage beside the story of Odysseus and Penelope, and Averno returns to the myth of Persephone.

Every book by Louise Glück →

Sappho

Ancient Greek · poems from around 600 BC; If Not, Winter (Carson's translation, 2002)

Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC and was counted in antiquity among the greatest lyric poets. Ancient scholars collected her poems in nine books; only one poem survives complete, and the rest are fragments quoted by later writers or recovered from papyrus. Carson's If Not, Winter translates the fragments and marks the missing text with square brackets.

Simone Weil

French · Gravity and Grace (1947), Waiting for God (1950)

Weil was a philosopher and activist who took factory jobs, including at Renault, to understand industrial work, and briefly joined an anarchist unit in the Spanish Civil War. She died in England in 1943, aged 34, and her notebooks and letters were published after her death. She was born into an agnostic Jewish family, and her harsh remarks about Judaism have long troubled readers.

Every book by Simone Weil →

Emily Dickinson

American · Poems (1890), The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955)

Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems in Amherst, Massachusetts, and saw fewer than a dozen published in her lifetime. Her first editors regularised her dashes and capitals; Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 edition was the first to print the poems close to how she wrote them.

Every book by Emily Dickinson →

W. G. Sebald

German · The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), Austerlitz (2001)

Sebald was born in Bavaria in 1944, taught at the University of East Anglia for three decades and died in a car crash near Norwich in 2001. His books mix memoir, history and fiction and print uncaptioned black-and-white photographs within the text. Austerlitz follows a man who learns as an adult that he came to Britain as a child on the Kindertransport.

Claudia Rankine

Jamaican-American · Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in New York. Citizen combines prose poems, essays and images to record everyday racism, from small remarks among colleagues to the treatment of Serena Williams on court; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

Every book by Claudia Rankine →

Emily Wilson

British-American · The Odyssey (translation, 2017), The Iliad (translation, 2023)

Wilson was born in Oxford in 1971 and teaches classics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her Odyssey was the first translation of the poem into English verse by a woman; it uses iambic pentameter and keeps the same number of lines as Homer's Greek. Her Iliad followed in 2023.

Lydia Davis

American · The Collected Stories (2009), Can't and Won't (2014)

Davis is known for very short stories, some only a sentence long, and for her translations of Proust's Swann's Way (2002) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (2010). She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 for her body of work.