Anne Carson receives the 2025 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award
On June 11, 2025, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award ceremony took place at the Palace of the Commonwealth. This year's 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, distinguishes the most outstanding authors whose work addresses themes crucial to Zbigniew Herbert's work - such as freedom, individual dignity, independence of thought, 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 $50,000. The winners are selected by an international jury consisting of outstanding poets and literary experts: Krystyna Dąbrowska, Edward Hirsch (USA), Michael Krüger (Germany), Mercedes Monmany (Spain) and Aleš Šteger (Slovenia).
Anne Carson, born in 1950 in Toronto, studied classical philology, which she then taught for many years. Her work, while remaining in constant dialogue with tradition, is simultaneously immersed in modernity - in its language, images and problems. The poet speaks with extraordinary directness about the nature of love and desire, pain and loss, transience and death. Dialogue with literature from its beginnings, from Homer and Sappho, naturally corresponds with the writing of Zbigniew Herbert, who also sought a spiritual bond with the heritage of antiquity and asked questions about the place of the individual in history. The poet's rich oeuvre includes Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, Eros the Bittersweet and Decreation. Still waiting for translation is the extraordinary work Nox – a poem, a collection of fragments, notes, translations, a work of visual art, and above all an elegy for her deceased brother.
Anne Carson said during the ceremony:
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.
In the laudation delivered in honour of the laureate, jury member, poet and translator Krystyna Dąbrowska emphasized:
Anne Carson calls her long poems “novels” or “essays” and indeed she incorporates the elements of the essay, prose poetry, drama and translation into lyrical diction (...) By 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 gala, the laureate's poems and selected poems by Zbigniew Herbert were performed, interpreted by Magdalena Czerwińska and Maja Ostaszewska, in a subtle musical setting by clarinetist Paweł Szamburski. The evening ended with an audiovisual performance by Mariusz Wilczyński and Marcel Markowski.
The strategic partners of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award 2025 are the PZU Foundation and Liebrecht & wooD Poland. The media patron of the event is the Polish Radio.
