The New York poet Louise Glück, Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, died on Friday at the age of 80, as confirmed by her editor, Jonathan Galassi, to the Associated Press. The cause of his death was not immediately clear. Yes, the news caused a deep shock in American letters: Glück, owner of a clear and honest style and a work that did not avoid looking pain in the face, was one of the most beloved poets in the country and the first compatriot to achieve the world's highest prize for letters since T. S. Eliot in 1948. She served as the nation's poet laureate between 2003 and 2004.
A professor at Yale University, she treasured every possible prize in her country: from the Pulitzer for The Wild Iris (1992) to the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). In 2020, she was also awarded the Tranströmer Prize in Stockholm, promoted in memory of the last Swedish Nobel, who died in 2015. The Swedish Academy justified the decision to award him the Nobel because "his unmistakable poetic voice, which, with an austere beauty, makes individual existence universal."
She was born and raised in a suburb of Long Island, and debuted in 1968 with the poetry collection Firstborn, a work in which she already claimed her lineage as a writer in the lineage of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson or Robert Lowell. His books were duly published in Spanish, first by the publishing house Pre-Textos, and once he had obtained the Nobel, by Visor Libros.
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