The Griffin Poetry Prize has announced that it is honouring Margaret Atwood with the 2025 Lifetime Recognition Award.

Created in 2006, the Lifetime Recognition Award is bestowed periodically by the Griffin trustees to international artists working in poetry. In 2024, the award was given to Canadian poet Don McKay.

Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays; her most recent publication was Paper Boat, a collection of new and selected poems from 1961–2023, published in fall 2024. Her many awards include the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Margaret Atwood will sit down in conversation with Carolyn Forché at the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize Readings on June 4 in Toronto.

The event will also include readings by the 2025 shortlisted poets and the Canadian First Book Prize winner (to be announced on May 21), and a recitation by one of the 2025 Finalists of Poetry in Voice/Les voix de la poésie, a Canada-wide school recitation competition.

The Readings will culminate in the announcement of the winner of this year’s $130,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, which announced its shortlist in April.