First fiction work by Nobel prize-winning poet Louise Glück to be published in UK

Louise Glück, an American poet and Nobel laureate, will publish her first work of fiction in the UK later this year.

Marigold and Rose: A Fiction is a "prose narrative" about the title twins, following them in their first year of life as they "begin to piece together the world as they move between Mother's stories of 'Long, long ago' and Father's 'Once upon a time.'" The book, which will be released in October and is only 64 pages long, is a "investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be," according to Glück's publisher Carcanet.

Glück won the Nobel prize in 2020, with the Swedish Academy hailing her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. In winning, she became the first American woman to do so since Toni Morrison in 1993. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel prize committee, said Glück’s voice was “candid and uncompromising”, and that “Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works”.

The 79-year-old author has also received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her first collection of poetry, Firstborn, was published in 1968, and she went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1992.

In 2021, Kate Kellaway wrote in the Observer about a new collection of her poems, Poems 1962-2020, that reading Glück's work is "to encounter stillness and slow time."