American poet Louise Gluck reacts after winning the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. October 8, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Katherine Taylor.

i24News – The Swedish Academy awarded American Jewish writer Louise Glück the Nobel Literature Prize Thursday, “honoring a writer known for themes of childhood and family life,” the jury said.

The 77-year-old professor of English at the prestigious Yale University was honored “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” the Academy maintained as cited in The Times of Israel (TOI).

Glück was born in 1943 in New York, her paternal grandparents being Hungarian Jews who emigrated to the United States.

Her first poems were published in 1968 in a collection entitled “Firstborn.” She has since published more than a dozen books since and in 2003 was named the United States’ poet laureate.

She has drawn on a number of influences in her work – particularly Greek and Roman mythology – but critics have also “detected traces of her Jewish heritage in a number of poems,” according to TOI.

Glück has previously been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection “The Wild Iris,” and that National Book Award in 2014. In 2016, then-President Barack Obama presented her with the National Humanities Medal.”

In an ordinary non-Covid year, Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf would present the awards in a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10 – the anniversary of scientist Alfred Nobel’s 1896 death.

Earlier this week, the Nobel Committee awarded several prizes for science, including one for physiology and medicine was awarded to Jewish American Harvey J. Alter, compatriot Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the hepatitis C virus.