Canadian poets Susan Musgrave and Iman Mersal are among the poets shortlisted for the $130,000 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Musgrave was shortlisted for her latest collection, Exculpatory Lilies, and Mersal for The Threshold, a collection originally written in Arabic and translated into English by Robyn Creswell.

The winner will be announced at the Griffin Poetry Prize readings in Toronto on June 7. In cases where the winning book is a translation, the translator and original poet share the prize money, with the translator to receive 60%. The finalists will each receive $10,000. The shortlisted books were selected from a 10-book longlist announced last month.

The shortlisted books are:

• The Threshold by Robyn Creswell, translated from the Arabic written by Iman Mersal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón (Corsair Poetry)
• Exculpatory Lilies by Susan Musgrave (McClelland & Stewart)
• Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves (W. W. Norton)
• Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (Cape Poetry and Penguin Press)

To make their selections, the judges (Macedonian poet and translator Nikola Madzirov, Métis poet and professor Gregory Scofield, and former poet laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey) read 602 books of poetry, including 54 translations from 20 languages, that were submitted by 229 publishers in 20 different countries.

This year, for the first time since the prize was launched in 2000, the Griffin’s Canadian and international categories have merged from two categories, each of which carried a $65,000 purse, into one category with a single $130,000 prize.

The winner of the $10,000 Canadian First Book Prize, a newly created prize for a first book of poetry by a Canadian poet, will be announced on May 17.