Nobel-Prize Winner Anne Carson Bridges Past and Present
By Wim Langedijk for HURS
Nobel-Prize Winner Anne Carson Bridges Past and Present
HUR Reads is our definitive shortlist of the most prominent articles from around the web.
By HURS Team
1
The Woman Who Wants You to Ditch Your Phone
Four years ago, artist August Lamm had 200,000 Instagram followers. Now she’s urging people to abandon their smartphones and reclaim their attention. After trading her iPhone for a basic Nokia, Lamm rediscovered reading, writing and a less mediated way of living. Her new book, You Don’t Need a Smartphone, combines practical advice with a critique of an online culture that has made constant connectivity feel compulsory. Her next project: a house where guests can lock away their devices.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Simon Schama calls M.F.K. Fisher the greatest food writer who ever lived. Her work goes well beyond recipes, exploring the emotional and psychological dimensions of eating with wit and lyrical precision. A new Picador series reissues five volumes from her Art of Eating collection, including How to Cook a Wolf and Consider the Oyster, with fresh introductions by contemporary writers. Fisher’s gift was making even a frozen tangerine slice a meditation on pleasure, memory and love.
HOW TO SPEND IT
Writer Lynne Tillman reflects on her decades-long friendship with artist Susan Hiller, whose work challenged accepted truths and explored the irrational, forgotten histories and cultural beliefs. From Hiller’s early feminist exhibitions to installations examining memory and the unconscious, Tillman traces how her friend’s art shaped her own thinking. Hiller encouraged her to embrace uncertainty, question assumptions and resist easy conclusions. Their friendship, sustained through letters and long conversations, remained inseparable from the art that defined Hiller’s life.
FRIEZE
French artist Sophie Calle turns personal experiences into conceptual art, transforming heartbreak, absence and unfinished ideas into works that invite fresh interpretations. Her new exhibition, Something Missing?, at Margate’s Turner Contemporary brings together projects exploring memory, perception and loss, including portraits of people blind from birth describing beauty. Now 72, Calle is contemplating one final subject: her own death. For an artist who has made a practice of turning life into art, it may be her most personal project yet.
ANOTHER MAGAZINE
Winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, Anne Carson makes ancient texts feel startlingly new. The Canadian poet and classicist draws on fragments of Greek mythology, philosophy and literature, reshaping them through a restless mix of poetry, essays and experimental forms. In Autobiography of Red, she transforms a myth about a winged monster into an unlikely love story. Carson’s gift lies in making the distant feel both strange and intimate, turning abstract ideas into deeply recognizable human emotions.