Carson is a poet, essayist and classicist, and is one of the world's best-known writers.
Several of her poetry collections have been published in Poland, including Decreation, Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband and Eros the Bittersweet.
Carson has won numerous literary awards. In 2001, she became the first woman to win the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize, awarded by the Poetry Book Society.
During a visit to Poland last year, she received the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award.
Her poetry, prose and academic work blur boundaries between antiquity and the contemporary world, modernism and postmodernism, and Canadian and American literary traditions.
Secrecy, concealment and revelation are central themes in her work. She also explores the sexuality of other writers.
Her 1995 poetry collection Glass, Irony and God features a volcano painted by Carson on its cover instead of a photograph of the author.
The volcano also appears at a climactic point in Autobiography of Red (1998), a novel in verse that adapts elements of Greek literature. Its protagonist, Geryon, a red-winged figure from Greek mythology, is reimagined by Carson as a contemporary gay man.
Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950 and studied classics. She taught at McGill University in Canada and the University of Michigan in the United States.
(sp/gs)
Source: IAR/PAP