Louise Elisabeth Glück

Louise Elisabeth Glück was born in New York City to a Jewish family of Austro-Hungarian descent. Overcoming severe adolescent anorexia, she pursued poetry workshops at Columbia University under Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. Her debut collection, Firstborn, was published in 1968, marking the arrival of an austere, uncompromising poetic voice.

Glück went on to publish over a dozen acclaimed poetry volumes, serving as US Poet Laureate in 2003–2004. Her 1992 collection The Wild Iris, intertwining monologues of flowering plants, a gardener, and an inscrutable deity, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 2014, she won the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night. In 2020, Glück became the first American female poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in over two decades, praised for transforming personal grief, trauma, and mythic resonance into universally sublime verse.