American poet Louise Glück has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature this year on Thursday. Literature Laureate Louise Glück made her debut in 1968 with ‘Firstborn’ and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. She has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry.

The official Twitter feed of the Nobel Prize wrote: “The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.

The 77-year old is only the second woman poet to win the award after the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Prize in 1996. Glück is also the second American to win the award since Bob Dylan in 2016.

One of America’s most well-known contemporary poets, Glück, professor of English at Yale University, began writing in her teens; her first collection of poetry, Firstborn (1968), was published when she was only 25. Firstborn gained favourable reviews for the poet’s unique style, marked by an economy of words and emotion. Her second collection, The House on Marshland, seven years later, would establish her as a poet of reckoning. Since then she has written 12 collections of poetry, including Descending Figure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), The Wild Iris (1992) and The Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014).