Karen Leeder; Durs Grünbein

The Griffin Poetry Prize announced its 2025 international winner as part of the Griffin Poetry Prize Readings event in Toronto on June 4.

The winner of the C$130,000 international prize is Karen Leeder for Psyche Running: Selected Poems, 2005–2022, for her translation of the work of Durs Grünbein from the German, published by Seagull Books. The collection brings together more than 100 of Grünbein’s poems.

Leeder is a U.K. writer, translator, and scholar of German culture at the University of Oxford. Berlin-based Grünbein, also a translator and a professor of poetics and aesthetics at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, is the author of more than 25 books of poetry and essays. The translation by Michael Hoffmann of his poetry collection Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, had been a finalist for the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006.

The judges, Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, Northern Irish poet and novelist Nick Laird, and Polish poet, translator, and essayist Tomasz Różycki said in their citation that, “Durs Grünbein’s Psyche Running is a brilliant overview and selection of a poet who satisfies our hunger to be serious, as again and again he finds himself “between words and things.” Karen Leeder’s adept translations establish a new version of Grünbein in English: universal, lyrical, philosophical.”

For a translated work, the prize is shared 60% to the translator, 40% to the original author. Each of the finalists receives $10,000.

This year the shortlist included three translations, two of them the work of the late poets Nicolás Guillén and Tomaž Šalamun.

The previously announced $25,000 Lifetime Recognition Award was also presented to Margaret Atwood at the event.

In May, Whitehorse-based poet Dawn Macdonald was named winner of the $10,000 Griffin Canadian First Book Prize for Northerny, published by University of Alberta Press.