Griffin Poetry Prize; Liz Howard (Ralph Kolewe)

Poets David Bradford, Tolu Oloruntoba, and Liz Howard have been shortlisted for the $65,000 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. Oloruntoba won the 2021 Governor General’s award for his nominated collection. Howard is a previous Griffin winner.

Four finalists were named for the international prize, including Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky’s translation of Ukranian poet Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow.

The two winners will be announced by the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry on June 15 via social media.

The Griffin Poetry Prize was founded in 2000 by Scott Griffin. It is the largest international English-language poetry prize in the world. The winners will receive $65,000 and the other finalists are each awarded $10,000.

The shortlisted titles are:

Canadian

• Dream of No One But Myself by David Bradford (Brick Books)
• Letters in a Bruised Cosmos by Liz Howard (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada)
• The Junta of Happenstance by Tolu Oloruntoba (Anstruther Books/Palimpsest Press)

International

• Late to the House of Words by Sharon Dolin, translated from the Catalan written by Gemma Gorga (Saturnalia Books)
• Sho by Douglas Kearney (Wave Books)
• Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, translated from the Ukrainian written by Natalka Bilotserkivets (Lost Horse Press)
• Asked What Has Changed by Ed Roberson (Wesleyan University Press)

The judges for this year’s prize are Adam Dickinson (Canada), Valzhyna Mort (Belarus/U.S.), and Claudia Rankine (Jamaica/U.S.). The shortlisted titles were selected from 639 entries, including 57 translations from 24 languages, that were submitted by 236 publishers from 16 different countries.