Louise Glück is an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the judges praising “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. The poet Craig Morgan Teicher has described her as a writer for whom “words are always scarce, hard won, and not to be wasted”. Gluck’s awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.

Glück is often described as an autobiographical poet and as such she is best known for lyric poetry, and for poems possessed of acute emotional intensity which often draw on mythological or natural images to mediate on modern life. Some of her many themes include trauma, desire and nature. Scholars have also focused on her employment of poetic personas and the relationship in her poems with autobiography and classical myth.