For once, the bookies got it right. At the end of September, Ladbrokes had Anne Carson at 33/1, but a day before the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced, she was joint favourite, with the Chinese experimental novelist Can Xue.

The Nobel was once famous for its surprises; think Bob Dylan, a bolt out of the blue, or Abdulrazak Gurnah, who didn’t make most betting lists. That is in the past, however, and this year, Carson was clearly the safest bet, a critics’ favourite with a shelf of prizes to her name. Since the Academy’s 2018 scandal, the winner has alternated between men and women, and after Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai won last year, people widely expected a woman.

She might be a safe pick, but her ideas are seismic, and I dare say, a few Indians might do well to at least hear.

Carson is a classicist who wrote her doctorate on Sappho, an ancient Greek lyric poet, and spent more than three decades teaching ancient Greek at Princeton, McGill and Michigan. Her first book of poems appeared when she was 42, late in an age when 12-year-olds are published authors, and even then she was unsure whether she should be called a poet at all. Everything original in her work rests on the unglamorous labour of reading dead languages line by line, year after year, until she produced something unconventional, thought-provoking, and original, despite its classical basis.

Not just original, Carson,........

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