The Nobel prize-winning American poet and essayist Louise Glück has died at the age of 80. She was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2020, with the Nobel judges praising “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

New Yorker Glück published more than a dozen books of poetry. According to the Poetry Foundation, Glück is known for her technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death. Because Glück wrote about disappointment, rejection, loss, and isolation, reviewers frequently refer to her poetry as “bleak” or “dark.”

She received the Pulitzer prize in 1993 for Wild Iris, a book of poems which dealt with themes of suffering, death and rebirth. She also served as the US poet laureate from 2003-2004, and taught at Stanford and Yale.

She was descended from eastern European Jews and was raised on Long Island. She later credited her ability to write to seven years of intensive psychoanalysis in her 20s. By her mid-20s, she was publishing poems in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. “The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last,” she once wrote.

Glück was married and divorced twice, first in 1967 to Charles Hertz Jr, and to John Dranow in 1977, with whom she shared a son, Noah.

Background: Louise Glück awarded Nobel literature prize