She was standing somewhere in Iceland, the wind apparently loud enough to be worth mentioning, when the Swedish Academy reached her by telephone. Ingrid Carlberg, the academy's permanent secretary, later recalled that Anne Carson had just enough time, before the news became public, to explain where she was and what she could hear. It is a fittingly strange detail for a writer whose career has made a habit of collapsing distances — between Toronto and ancient Athens, between scholarly footnote and open wound, between the 5th century BC and whatever decade we are currently living through. Carson, born in Toronto in 1950 and long associated with classics departments at Princeton, New York University and McGill, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature this week for what the academy called a "bold and inventive oeuvre" that reimagines the classical tradition for contemporary readers.

The prize, worth 12 million Swedish kronor, or roughly £900,000, is given for a lifetime's work rather than a single book, and Carson's spans four decades: from Eros the Bittersweet in 1986, a meditation on desire through Greek literary criticism, to Autobiography of Red, her 1998 novel in verse that turned a fragmentary myth about a red-winged monster into the story of a heartbroken teenage boy. In 2001, she became the first woman to win the TS Eliot Prize, for The Beauty of the Husband, having already collected Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships along the way. Mark Carney, Canada's prime minister, posted that she had "transformed the way we think about literature," calling it a proud moment for the country. David Leonard of the Writers' Trust of Canada went further, describing her body of work simply as intoxicating.