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Anne Carson and Navi Pillay: The Only Two Women on the 2026 Nobel List

By Teona Abuladze 5 min read October 16, 2026

Ten people won Nobel Prizes this October. Two are women: a Canadian poet who reads ancient Greek for pleasure and a South African judge who helped make rape a recognized act of genocide. All eight laureates in the sciences and economics are men.

By Teona Abuladze · 6 min read

When the Swedish Academy reached Anne Carson on October 8, she gave a short interview to Icelandic television. Her word for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature was “crazy.”

The next morning in Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its Peace Prize. Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, 85, heard the news while standing in the historic courtroom in Nuremberg where Nazi leaders were tried after the Second World War. She said perhaps it was meant to be.

The count

Here is the full 2026 list. Medicine: Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for optogenetics. Physics: Francis Halzen, for the IceCube neutrino observatory. Chemistry: Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai. Economics: Robert Hall and Michael Woodford. Literature: Anne Carson. Peace: Navi Pillay.

Eight men in the sciences and economics. Two women, both in the prizes awarded for words and for law.

Going into this year, AFP counted five women among 230 physics laureates, eight among 200 in chemistry, 14 among 232 in medicine and three among 99 in economics. Those numbers did not move in 2026.

Five women out of 230 physics laureates. This year did not add a sixth.

Anne Carson, 19th of 123

Carson was born in Toronto on June 21, 1950. Her Latin teacher taught her ancient Greek during lunch breaks in high school, and she never stopped. She became a classicist, a translator of Sappho, Sophocles and Euripides, and a poet who doesn’t fit any shelf.

Autobiography of Red (1998) is a novel in verse that takes a minor monster from Greek myth, Geryon, and makes him a shy, red-winged boy in love with a boy named Herakles. Nox (2010) is a book-length elegy for her brother Michael, who disappeared for years and died in Denmark in 2000. It comes folded in a box, like a scrapbook. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy puts Marilyn Monroe inside the story of Helen.

The Academy’s citation praised her “bold and inventive” work in “playful dialogue with the classical tradition.” Carson herself has said every piece she writes starts from the history of a word.

She is 76, holds Icelandic citizenship as well as Canadian, and becomes the 19th woman among 123 literature laureates since 1901. The first was Selma Lagerlöf, in 1909.

If you have never read her, start with Autobiography of Red. It is stranger and funnier than its reputation.

Navi Pillay, the judge

Pillay was born in Durban in 1941 into a Tamil family, under apartheid. In 1967 she became the first woman to open a law practice in the province of Natal. As a defense lawyer she represented Nelson Mandela and other opponents of the regime.

In 1995 she became the first woman of color to sit on South Africa’s High Court. Soon after, she was elected a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

That is where the decision the Nobel committee singled out was made. In 1998, in the case against Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor, the tribunal ruled for the first time that rape and sexual violence could constitute acts of genocide when committed with intent to destroy a group. Pillay sat on that panel. The same judgment also set a precedent on direct and public incitement to genocide.

She later presided over the Rwanda tribunal, served at the International Criminal Court, and was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014.

Before 1998, no international court had called rape an act of genocide.

The committee chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, said the system of international law is under tremendous pressure and its institutions under attack. Pillay dedicated the prize to all survivors of international crimes.

The reaction

Pillay’s most recent job was chairing the UN commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory. In 2025 it concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Israel rejected the findings. After the Nobel announcement, its foreign ministry called the award a weaponization of the prize against Israel.

On the same day, President Trump posted that the committee had “demeaned” the prize, and the White House imposed new sanctions on the International Criminal Court. Pillay, at the podium, joked that she might share the prize with him if the audience clapped a little longer.

The committee’s own statement framed the prize around her whole career: decades spent making sure war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.

After the Gaza report, Pillay said, people kept praising her courage. She was surprised by that. Why would you need courage to speak the truth?

Both women will receive their prizes on December 10. Carson in Stockholm, Pillay in Oslo.

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Teona Abuladze

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