Anne Carson receives the 2025 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award
On June 11, 2025, the National Library hosted this year’s Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award Ceremony. The winner was Anne Carson, an outstanding poet, essayist and classicist – one of the most original figures in contemporary literature.
The Award, granted by the Zbigniew Herbert Foundation since 2013, honours outstanding authors who write on themes crucial to Herbert's work, such as freedom, individual dignity, intellectual independence and respect for cultural heritage. It is the only literary award with a global reach granted in Poland. The winner receives a statuette and a check for USD 50,000. The winners are selected by an international panel of outstanding poets and literary experts: Krystyna Dąbrowska (Poland), Edward Hirsch (USA), Michael Krüger (Germany), Mercedes Monmany (Spain) and Aleš Šteger (Slovenia).
Anne Carson, born in Toronto in 1950, studied Classical Philology, which she later taught for many years at universities across Canada and the United States. Her work, in constant dialogue with tradition, is deeply contemporary in its language, imagery and subject matter. She speaks with extraordinary directness about the nature of love and desire, pain and loss, transience and death, engaging with ancient literature from Homer and Sappho – an approach that naturally resonates with Herbert’s own spiritual bond with antiquity and reflection on the place of the individual in history. Carson’s rich oeuvre includes Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, Eros the Bittersweet and Decreation. Still awaiting translation into Polish is her extraordinary Nox – a poem, a collection of fragments, notes, translations, a work of visual art, and above all an elegy for the poet’s deceased brother.
In her acceptance speech, Anne Carson said: I like thinking. It seems to me one of the most exhilarating things we do as human beings. And if you want to record or transcribe or capture the exhilaration of thinking, your best machinery will be a poem. That is why I am particularly drawn to the poems of Zbigniew Herbert that speak in the voice of a certain Mr Cogito and address problems of cogitation.
Jury member, poet and translator Krystyna Dąbrowska, in her tribute to the prize-winner said: Anne Carson calls her long poems “novels” or “essays” and indeed she incorporates elements of the essay, prose poetry, drama and translation into her lyrical diction [...]. While crossing genres and playing with our expectations, Carson doesn’t leave the realm of poetry – on the contrary, she expands its limits, or even makes it seem limitless. She is a poet of stunning imagination, giving me, as a reader, the feeling of utter freedom, of discovering new worlds.
During the celebration, poems by Carson and Herbert were read by Magdalena Czerwińska and Maja Ostaszewska, accompanied by clarinettist Paweł Szamburski. The evening ended with an audiovisual performance by Mariusz Wilczyński and Marcel Markowski.
Fundacja PZU and Liebrecht & wooD Poland are strategic partners of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award 2025. The media patron is Polskie Radio.
