Louise Glück has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Congratulations to the great Louise Glück, who was a surprise choice for this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Granted, the prize is rarely obvious, but Glück —a former poet laureate of the United States—wasn’t mentioned much in any of this year’s pre-prize chatter. The prize committee cited Glück’s “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” She is the first American woman to win the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993. Here is Glück on her early readings, and the elusive difference between realism and fantasy.

(This is Glück’s moment, but I am pleased that Michel Houellebecq did not win.)