Holders of The International Vigdís Prize

Asifa Majid, psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist, is the 2024 recipient of the international Vigdís Prize, an award conferred for outstanding contributions to world languages and cultures.

Majid receives the 2024 Vigdís Prize for breaking ground in research on the relationship between language, culture, and cognition. Which aspects of cognition are universal, and which are language or culture specific? How does language influence thought? Majid’s research addresses these questions through innovative laboratory experiments, in-depth linguistic studies and field work in diverse cultures. She has made important contributions to research on how people conceptualize and talk about domains such as space and the sense of smell, highlighting commonalities and differences in how thoughts are mapped into words. Majid has championed linguistic diversity and cautioned against over-reliance on English in research on the human mind. She has also stressed the value of diverse perspectives and inclusion in science.

A native speaker of Punjabi and English, Majid obtained her undergraduate degree and a PhD in Psychology from University of Glasgow and a Masters from the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. She held academic appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in the Netherlands, the Radcliffe Insititute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and at the University of York and University of Oxford, where she is currently Professor of Cognitive Science. Majid was elected Fellow of the British Academy in July 2024 and has received several other awards, including the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building, awarded by the Cognitive Science Society. Her research has been published in prestigious academic journals and featured by the BBC, Time magazine and other international media.

Anne Carson, renowned poet, Classics scholar and translator, is the 2023 recipient of the international Vigdís Prize, an award conferred for outstanding contributions to world languages and cultures.

Born in Canada, Carson has a long and distinguished career as a professor of Classics and has taught Greek and classical Greek literature at several North American universities, including McGill, Princeton and NYU. She is also a poet, prose author, essayist and translator. The breadth of Carson‘s contribution to the field of language and culture has been acknowledged widely in arts and academia.

Her works of literature are interwoven with the legacy of classical culture and highlight the significance of the humanities in the world of art. This is evident in her translations of key works of Ancient Greek and Latin literature, as well as in some of her poetry and prose, in which the spectacular vision of Ancient Greek tragedists appears to make itself felt on the stage of contemporary culture. Carson’s contribution resounds with that by some of the world’s better known modern writers who reveal the interplay of creation and destruction in human existence and society by embracing the legacy of classical culture.

Anne Carson has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the American Academy in Berlin. She was the first woman to receive the T.S. Eliot Prize and has won various other literary honors, including the Griffin Poetry Prize. Through her work in classical scholarship, literature and translation, Anne Carson has made a profound contribution to culture and language.