Canada’s Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, worth 12-million Swedish crowns (about $1.7-million). The announcement was made Thursday in Stockholm.

The 76-year-old modernist poet, translator, classics scholar and Member of the Order of Canada was recognized for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

She is the third Canadian to be awarded the prize given to a living writer for outstanding career contributions in literature.

“Anne Carson has, throughout her entire career, combined poetry writing with translation work and teaching at various universities. Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning. She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work,” the Swedish Academy said in a statement.

The Toronto-born writer has earned high international recognition before, receiving the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the T.S. Eliot Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Princess of Asturias Award and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.