Few accolades are as notoriously unpredictable as the Nobel prize in literature. Over the 24 years that bookmakers have offered odds, the favourite has won only four times. Yet it felt almost inevitable that Canadian author Anne Carson would take the title one day. The poet, classicist and translator, who has spent four decades quietly reinventing contemporary writing, is this year’s laureate.
Carson’s work turns classical antiquity (writers including Sophocles, Euripides and Sappho) into a vibrant, living dialogue. Dr Laura Jansen, an expert in Carson’s oeuvre, explains how she bridges scholarship and poetry and why her audacity with language changes how her readers see the world.
Elsewhere, Karl Deisseroth, this year’s Nobel laureate in medicine, sat down with our podcast team to explain how light is changing what we know about the brain.
And following the catastrophic summer floods in Nepal that left thousands dead or missing, new research reveals nearly 300,000 people live in high-risk zones across the Nepalese Himalayas.
