(VIN) After Jewish scientists and physicians attained shares of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physics respectively, the Nobel committee announced that the 2020 prize for literature would be awarded to Jewish-American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and raised on New York’s Long Island. She is the eldest of two surviving daughters of Daniel Glück, a businessman, and Beatrice Glück (née Grosby), a homemaker. Glück’s paternal grandparents, Hungarian Jews, emigrated to the United States, where they eventually owned a grocery store in New York. Glück’s father was the first member of his family born in the United States. He had an ambition to become a writer, but went into business with his brother-in-law, who had patented the X-Acto Knife.
Glück struggled for years with anorexia, eventually forgoing higher education in order to effectively overcome the disease. Instead, she took a poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College and, from 1963 to 1965, she enrolled in poetry workshops at Columbia University’s School of General Education, which offered programs for non-traditional students. Glück’s work include Firstborn(1968),The House on Marshland (1975),Descending Figure (1980) and the award-winning The Triumph of Achilles (1985) and The Wild Iris (1992). She also wrote Meadowlands (1996),Vita Nova (1999) and The Seven Ages (2001).
