Glück had been put in an uncomfortable spot. On Thursday morning, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Journalists were lining the street outside her home in Cambridge, Mass. Her phone hadn’t stopped ringing since 7 a.m., an onslaught of attention she described as “nightmarish.”
By now, Glück should be accustomed to acclaim. In a career that has lasted more than five decades, she has published a dozen volumes of poetry and received virtually every prestigious literary prize: The National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Humanities Medal, among others.
She’s revered by literary critics and her peers for her spare, direct and confessional verses.
“Her work is like an inner conversation. Maybe she’s talking to herself, maybe she’s talking to us. There’s a kind of irony to it,” said her longtime friend and editor, Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “One thing that’s very constant in her work is that inner voice. She’s always evaluating experience against some ideal that it never matches.”
The past few months have been trying for Glück, who is divorced and lives alone, and was accustomed to dining out with friends six nights a week before the pandemic. For several months in the spring, she struggled to write. Then, late this summer, she started writing poems again, and finished a new collection, titled “Winter Recipes From the Collective,” which FSG plans to release next year.
“The hope is that if you live through it, there will be art on the other side,” she said.
