An exact and explicit ladder-tensor-network ansatz is presented for the nonequilibrium steady state of an anisotropic Heisenberg XXZ spin-1/2 chain which is driven far from equilibrium with a pair of Lindblad operators acting on the edges of the chain only. We show that the steady-state density operator of a finite system of size n is—apart from a normalization constant—a polynomial of degree 2n - 2 in the coupling constant. Efficient computation of physical observables is facilitated in terms of a transfer operator reminiscent of a classical Markov process. In the isotropic case we find cosine spin profiles, 1/n^2 scaling of the spin current, and long-range correlations in the steady state. This is a fully nonperturbative extension of a recent result [Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 217206 (2011)]
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