Louise Glück, the celebrated American poet and winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on October 13 at her home in Cambridge, Mass. Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Glück's editor, confirmed her death. She was 80.

Glück, considered one of the foremost voices in American poetry, served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004 and was the author of 15 collections. Her debut collection, the aptly titled Firstborn, was published by New American Library in 1968. She went on to publish nine books with Ecco from 1975 until 2006, and published her final five books with FSG.

Known for her austere, autobiographical lyricism, Glück explored such themes as loss, loneliness, heartbreak, marriage, trauma, and aging in her work, which often contained classical allusions, philosophical questions, and intimate memories. Many of her poems, such as the well-known "Mock Orange" and "Dead End," express disillusionment with love and romance, while others, such as "New World" and "First Memory," mine the pain of childhood.

Born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island, Glück attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. At the time of her death, she lived in Cambridge and taught at Yale University.

Over the course of her career, Glück received just about every literary honor there is. In 1985, she won the National Book Critics Circle award for The Triumph of Achilles, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (and the William Carlos Williams Award) in 1993 for Wild Iris, perhaps her best known work. Her 2014 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night won the 2014 National Book Award. In 2015, she was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her "decades of powerful lyric poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively."

Glück was also the recipient of the Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement, the American Academy Arts and Letters Gold Medal, and the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award.

Her other collections include Vito Nova 1990), Proofs and Theories (1994), Meadowlands (1996), Ararat (2000), Averno (2006) The Seven Ages (2007) Poems 1962-2012 (2012), and Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021). In addition, Glück published two chapbooks and two essay collections, 1994's Proofs and Theories and 2017's American Originality.

"I think that, from her first book, it was clear to me that she was going to be one of the most important poets in America," said poet and former Ecco publisher Daniel Halpern, who published Glück's work for more than three decades, on the occasion of Glück's 2020 Nobel win. "It has to do with the way she schemetizes the world—it's definitely her voice and that language, which is unmistakable. I don't think you'd ever not recognize a Louise Glück line if you'd read it."