Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, and I’m feeling rather pleased about it.

Enough to make a little video.

When the Swedish Academy called to tell her, Carson was in Iceland,

“listening to the wind.”

There’s something lovely about that detail. An announcement that sends people around the world reaching for their phones, and the person at the centre of it is listening to the wind.

You can talk to the wind here, too. There’s a disconnected telephone in our secret garden at Dreamers Writing Farm. It found its way into the video, along with a figure hunched in thought beside the wishing well and near our Carson Bunkie, named after Anne Carson.

Apparently, I’ve been preparing for this announcement for a while.

What draws me to Carson’s work is her willingness to explore what writing can be. Poetry, prose, translation, photographs, fragments, drawings. Words that belong beside images. A book whose physical form is part of what it says.

Nox is the book I keep thinking about. Created after the death of her brother, it brings together poetry, translation, family photographs, letters, sketches and collage. It unfolds like an accordion and comes in a box.

I love that kind of work. Nick Bantock’s books appeal to me for a similar reason: the relationship between words and images, and the feeling that you’re discovering a story through the things someone has left behind. A letter. A photograph. A fragment that asks you to look again.

It makes me want to write, but also to make something.

That impulse is part of the garden here, too. There are things to find, things with histories, and things that leave room for your own interpretation. A Narnia door. A wishing well. A telephone that doesn’t work in the usual sense.

And the Carson Bunkie named after a writer whose work reminds me how many forms writing can take.

Congratulations, Anne Carson.

Feeling rather pleased about that name today.

*By Kat McNichol, Owner, Dreamers Writing Farm, published October 9, 2026.

Official press release: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2026 Anne Carson