Canisia Lubrin has won the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize for her second poetry collection, The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland & Stewart). Lubrin is currently working on a short-fiction collection for Knopf Canada in addition to serving as poetry editor for McClelland & Stewart. The Dyzgraphxst was a Q&Q 2020 Book of the Year.
The $65,000 International winner was Valzhyna Mort of Belarus for Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Each finalist will receive $10,000.
The announcement was made as part of a short film which premiered on YouTube on June 22. The film featured each of the finalists reading an excerpt of their nominated work, as well as a reading by Lifetime Recognition Award recipient Yusef Komunyakaa. The American poet won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994.
The winners were selected from 682 submissions by a jury comprised of Ilya Kaminsky, Aleš Šteger, and Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Souvankham Thammavongsa. The Griffin Poetry Prize was founded in 2000 by Scott Griffin. It is the largest international English-language poetry prize in the world.