Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for “bold and inventive” works that fuse the classical and the modern and blur the boundaries of poetry and prose.

The Toronto-born Carson, 76, has drawn on themes from classical Greek and Roman literature, modern influences and personal experience for genre-blending titles that have ranged from translations of ancient Greek poets to collaborations with dancers and musicians, including Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.

The Swedish Academy that awards the prize said she won “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

The permanent secretary of the academy said the author was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the panel reached her to notify her of the honor.

“She was very taken by surprise,” Ingrid Carlberg said.

Asked how she felt about the award, Carson told the Icelandic public broadcaster RUV: “I think they’re all crazy.” She described the conversation with the academy as “rather halting.”

“They have the usual questions, and I have no answers,” she said.

She said poetry is “probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster, and everybody is in a hurry. So basically I think it’s good because it’s brief. Except Homer. Homer’s not brief.”

Carson is among the more high-profile recent winners of the literature Nobel, which often honors authors little known outside of the literary world and is sometimes criticized for valuing literary experimentation over the ability to connect with a broad readership.

However, the prize can also introduce readers to writers and works beyond their own languages or reading habits.

Asked how the prize would change her sales, she said: “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book. Stickers help.”

Carson’s books include “Eros the Bittersweet,” a look at the pleasure and pain of desire in ancient Greek literature, the verse novel “Autobiography of Red,” as well as “Men in the Off Hours,” a collection of poetry and prose that won Canada’s Griffin Prize for poetry in 2001, and “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” which compares Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy.

“Autobiography of Red,” which reimagined the myth of Hercules and the monster Geryon as a love story, has sold nearly 100,000 copies in the U.S. alone, according to a spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf, which published the book in 1998.

She also has translated works of classical Greek literature that, the academy said, “may be regarded as independent works in their own right.” They include “If Not, Winter,” based on poem fragments by Sappho, Sophocles’ tragic plays “Electra” and “Antigone” and Euripides’ “Bakkhai.”

Carson’s award is the latest example of the Nobel academy recognizing “writers who enlarge our understanding of what literature can be,” said Laura Jansen, associate professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Bristol in the U.K.

“She wrote prose as poetry and poetry as prose, so she’s in many ways so innovative in her forms,” Jansen told the Associated Press. The academy recognized “that no one in the English language has been able to do what she’s done.”

“Economy of the Unlost,” from 1999, sets ancient Greek poet Simonides of Keos against 20th-century poet Paul Celan, while “Men in the Off Hours,” published in 2000, “aligns the historian Thucydides with Virginia Woolf,” said Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Literature Committee.

Carson, who won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2000, is the first Canadian Nobel literature winner since Alice Munro in 2013.

“With wit, imagination, and a style entirely her own,” Carson “has reimagined the classics. She has brought ancient stories to new audiences and transformed the way we think about literature,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney posted on social media.