Louise Glück, who has died aged 80, was a poet of sharp directness and sometimes dark observation. She won the 2020 Nobel prize for literature, the first American poet to do so since TS Eliot in 1948. Announcing the award, the Swedish Academy praised the way her poetry’s “austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
In her acceptance speech, Glück referred to both Eliot and Emily Dickinson, explaining how she felt “drawn to poems of intimate selection or collusion, poems to which the listener or reader made an essential contribution”.
