Struck by poetry since she was a child, when she invented a competition to reward the most beautiful poetry in the world, a prize that then in 2020 the Nobel jurors attributed to her: Louise Gluck, the American awarded three years ago the highest world recognition for literature after collecting a Pulizter and a National Book Award for her work, she died at the age of 80 of cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The announcement was made by Jonathan Galassi, who had edited the publication of his works in the US for the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gluck was the sixteenth woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature: before her the last American awarded was Bob Dylan. The first thing he thought, once he got the prize phone call from Stockholm -- with a check for ten million Swedish kroner, the equivalent of just over a million dollars, was, "I'll be able to buy myself a house in Vermont." The other thought was "how to preserve the daily lives of the people I love." And always in the heat the poet, who in her literary creations had explored the themes of trauma and loss, family and loneliness, had thought: "I will no longer have friends. Almost everyone is a writer."
Then, when asked what to suggest to read to those who were not familiar with his work, he advised "not to start from his first book" (Firstborn of 1968) and perhaps start with Averno, the collection based on the mother-daughter relationship with the myth of Demeter and Persephone in the background published in 2006 in the USA and in Italy in 2019 by the publishing house and bookshop of Naples Dante & Descartes, or 2014's Faithful and Virtuous Night.
After the Nobel, his 12 volumes of poems were purchased by the Saggiatore.
Gluck, who last year was awarded the Lerici Pea prize in Italy, was born in New York. It was there, after she began teaching at Goddard College, that Louise overcame a long "writer's block" and produced her second collection of poems, The House on Marshland, published in 1975 and critically acclaimed. In Goddard Louise had also met her second husband, the writer John Dranow, father of her only son Noah, from whom she had divorced in the nineties.
Among other works, the very personal Ararat, which drew its origins from the pain felt for the death of his father. Poet laureate in the USA (the federal office that is assigned to distinguished writers with the mandate to promote poetry) in 2003 and 2004, Luise Gluck divided her time between Yale, where she taught, Montpelier in Vermont, Cambridge and California: last year she was called by Stanford in the Department of creative writing.
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