Winner of the 2025 James David Forbes Collecting Prize

In this post, winner of the 2025 James David Forbes Collecting Prize, fourth -year undergraduate student Kate Oneal, tells us about her collection of Anne Carson’s works.

When I stepped up to receive this year’s James David Forbes award, I brushed right past an introduction to Anne Carson – I forgot that most people might not be as familiar with an enigmatic 70-year old Canadian woman as I am. Anne Carson is a writer, translator, Classicist, poet, artist, boxer … basically, you name it. Not only is her writing beautiful and unique, but, as a Classicist myself, I find her work to be pushing the discipline forward immensely, representing the most exciting reception work I’ve engaged with to date.

When I say that Carson engages closely with Greek and Latin, she certainly does, but she does so in such a distinctive style that the adjective ‘Carsonian’ has been created in an attempt to find some way to describe her work. Her work faces a lot of backlash for diverging from the source texts too much, but I find her refusal to treat Classics like it’s fragile very refreshing. She plays with the texts, extracting what she wants from them, often amping up the queer or feminist elements of the text. Her Autobiography of Red, for example, purports to be a translation of Stesichorus fragments and, while it sort of is, it is also a complete adaptation of the myth of Heracles, written from the perspective of Geryon, a red-winged monster that Heracles kills during his labours – Carson reconfigures this to be a queer coming-of-age love story set in Canada. At the end of the day, my collection comes from a love of Carson’s work , and an appreciation of the ways in which I think she’s completely reshaping the bounds of Classics.

My collection started around six years ago, with a copy of Carson’s translation of Sappho, If not, Winter, and her book Autobiography of Red. I was in high school and quickly developing an interest in Classics and the ancient world. As a young queer girl, I was introduced to Classics by way of Sappho, and everything I saw online said that Carson’s translation was the best of them. Needless to say, I was hooked. I then turned towards reading her own writing, with Autobiography of Red. I stumbled across a copy of it in a local used bookstore – now that I have been collecting for years, I know how lucky that was! – and it changed my life. The combination of these two reading experiences, and the vitality Carson injected into these ancient stories, filled me with a passion for not only Carson’s work but Classics overall, and it is completely thanks to her that I have fallen in love with Classics. I asked for The Beauty of the Husband and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy for Christmas, which cemented my love of her work and kicked off my collection.

With four of her books under my belt, I began to seek out more of her work. After moving to the UK for university, I began to notice there were major differences between UK and US editions of Carson’s works, which is what led me to start collecting both countries’ editions. This is where my collection truly started, and it continues to grow as Carson both publishes more and as I unearth earlier publications. I try to find most of her books used, as it feels more special to stumble upon one of her books rather than order it online. This is especially so given how rare it is to find her books in brick and mortar stores, let alone brick and mortar thrift stores! When I find one of her books in person, it feels like the book came to me at the right time, and that is usually how I decide the reading order.

Since winning the award, I’ve already added a few books to my collection. I found a first edition of If Not, Winter, with the Ancient Greek printed in oxblood colored ink – a worthy addition to my Sappho copies. I’ve also purchased a literary magazine with a poem of hers in it called ‘Grassmarket: A Threat Documentary’ which is unpublished anywhere else. This is an area of my collection that I’m really excited to expand on: my collection is ultimately an attempt to find everything Anne Carson has ever written, and I use this word find very literally. She is extremely prolific and has published very widely, to the point that there her writings are scattered across hundreds of publications. She has published in high brow literary magazines like Granta and The Paris Review, but she also loves to do a very niche artistic collaboration. For example, I have a book called The Blue of Distance (which I actually found on Vinted!), that was an artist book for a specific museum collection being shown in Colorado in 2015. Part of the goal of my collection is to try and bring a lot of these works together and create a complete bibliography of everything that Carson has ever published. When so much of her work only exists in pages floating around the world, it is important to me to have physical copies of her works, and hence my collection.

I’m so grateful to be this year’s winner of the James David Forbes Prize, and very excited to continue my collection. Thank you so much to the panel for such a joyful experience and for giving me the opportunity to speak on and share my two favourite things: Anne Carson and books!

Kate Oneal
Final-year student in Classical Studies and Ancient Greek