Glück won the National Book Award for Poetry for Faithful and Virtuous Night at the November 19, 2014 ceremony.
On November 19, 2014, Louise Glück was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) at the ceremony held in New York City. The National Book Award, established in 1950, is among the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States, and the poetry category has historically recognized transformative and enduring contributions to American verse.
Faithful and Virtuous Night represented a striking formal departure for Glück, blending prose poems and lyric verse into a book-length meditation on aging, mortality, and the porousness of memory, narrated through a fictionalized painter figure. Critics praised the collection's dreamlike, elegiac tone and its innovative structure, which eschewed conventional narrative in favor of fragmented, hallucinatory recollection.
This win marked Glück's first National Book Award, adding to a body of honors that already included the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollingen Prize, and it underscored her continued relevance and innovation late in her career, more than four decades after her 1968 debut. The ceremony, held at Cipriani Wall Street in New York, celebrated Glück alongside other honorees in fiction, nonfiction, and young people's literature. The award further cemented her legacy as a poet whose work continued to evolve formally and thematically well into her seventies, culminating six years later in the Nobel Prize in Literature.