Anne Carson Is (Yet Another) Perfect Nobel Literature Laureate

It’s hard to argue with the Canadian poet who was awarded literature’s most prestigious award on Thursday. That may be the problem.

For what is perhaps the world’s stuffiest, most self-important, and—sure—rarefied cultural award, the Nobel Prize in literature is also often quite funny. That a lot of people take it far too seriously has been the premise of the tens of thousands of words we have written about it, stretching back more than a decade.

Still, the best joke about the Nobel in those 11 years was one we didn’t write. In 2016, the Swedish Academy awarded world literature’s most prestigious honor to Bob Dylan, who promptly did everything he could not to accept it. This was funny in part because we had predicted that Dylan would not win the prize—not that year, and not ever. But this couldn’t lay a glove on the bigger joke that Dylan had won at all. It was a lesson in humility that we’ve carried with us ever since: The Nobel Prize in literature is always funnier than anything we could write about it. 

It was a lesson we should have already learned. In 2007, cameras ambushed Doris Lessing outside her London home as she was coming back from grocery shopping. She had just won global literature’s biggest prize, the assembled journalists excitedly told her. “Oh Christ,” she responded. She had already won “every bloody one” of Europe’s prizes. The Nobel, she sighed, completed the “royal flush.”

Lessing was as expertly deadpan and awkward as the best of British comedy. It wasn’t entirely clear if she was irritated because she won the Nobel Prize, because she was impatient to put away her groceries, or because her house was surrounded by the worst and most obnoxious people on earth (British journalists). What was clear, even then, was that this kind of thing likely would not happen again—anyone currently laureate-worthy (even William Vollmann) would almost certainly carry a cell phone while shopping (even while doing the kind of shopping Vollman does). In any case, it was a great video—and one we thought would never be equaled, let alone surpassed, in the annals of Nobel announcements. 

This video of Japanese fans reacting to the news that Haruki Murakami had—once more—gone un-laureated on Thursday morning is just as perfect and every bit as funny. It may be even better: 

Video: A Haruki Marukami mega fan reacts with sadness to the announcement that his favorite novelist did not win this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. In their haste to create an announcement sign, someone misspelled the name of the winner, Anne Carson. https://t.co/uip4EoL0uX— Jeffrey J. Hall 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@mrjeffu) October 8, 2026

Video: A Haruki Marukami mega fan reacts with sadness to the announcement that his favorite novelist did not win this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. In their haste to create an announcement sign, someone misspelled the name of the winner, Anne Carson. https://t.co/uip4EoL0uX

An anguished man holds up his arms in genuine pain while desperately clinging to a sign attesting to his love for Murakami (and wearing his favorite author’s signature item of clothing—a T-shirt that is a little too loud). Then the camera pans to an older man wearing a ridiculous pink beret, sitting next to a younger one wearing a Forrest Gump T-shirt. Then the camera cuts again, to a woman holding a white board containing the name of the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in literature: “Ann Carson,” the Canadian poet. Her name is actually “Anne,” though that misspelling only pushes an already perfect video into the pantheon.

The torment, the stupid T-shirts, the sense of absolute, absurd devotion: It is exactly like a crowd scene you would see in the middle of a college football bowl game. It’s genuinely funny. This is what it’s all about. (It is also—down to the Forrest Gump shirt—exactly what Philip Roth went through every year in early October as he sat in his agent Andrew Wylie’s office at the crack of dawn waiting for a call that would........

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