Renowned American poet and Nobel laureate in literature, Louise Glück, has passed away at the age of 80.

In 2020, she was awarded the Nobel Prize, becoming the first American poet to receive this honor since TS Eliot more than seven decades earlier.

Her poems often delved into themes of trauma and disillusionment, with her most famous work, "Mock Orange," challenging the significance of love and intimacy.

Her publishers confirmed Glück's passing on Friday.

Jonathan Galassi, her long-time editor, stated, "Louise Gluck's poetry articulates our enduring yet hesitant quest for knowledge and connection in an often unreliable world. Her literary legacy is timeless."

A close friend informed The New York Times that she succumbed to cancer at her residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Glück served as the U.S. poet laureate from 2003 to 2004 and, most recently, held positions as a professor of English at Yale University and a professor of poetry at Stanford University.

She received nearly every accolade that an American poet could aspire to.

In 2020, the Nobel judges commended her "distinctive poetic voice that, with austere beauty, makes individual existence universally relatable."

Her collection "The Wild Iris" earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, addressing themes of suffering, mortality, and renewal.

Her other honors include the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, given in 2008, the National Book Award in 2014, and a National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2015 by Barack Obama.

Glück, whose name is pronounced "Glick", was born in 1943 in New York, and published more than a dozen books of poetry over her lifetime.

Her works were short, often less than one page, and focused on the painful reality of being human, dealing with themes such as death, childhood, and family life.

She also took inspiration from Greek mythology and its characters, such as Persephone and Eurydice, who are often the victims of betrayal.

Her debut book, released in 1968, was titled Firstborn and was published after she dropped out of college and had her first of two divorces.

Her father, who helped invent the X-Acto Knife, encouraged her writing. But she had a difficult childhood, which included hospital treatment for anorexia.

"My interactions with the world as a social being were unnatural, forced, performances, and I was happiest reading," she said of her childhood in one 2006 interview.

For a sample of her work, look to the final line of her poem Nostos, named for a Greek term meaning "homecoming".