Top row, from left to right: Kevin Young, Elvira Hernández, Gbenga Adesina, and Ange Mlinko. Bottom row, from left to right: Alec Schumacher, Aracelis Girmay, and Daniel Borzutzky.Melanie Dunea, Sebastian Utreras, Jimmy Ho, Yekaterina Gyadu
The five books shortlisted for Canada’s international Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced, and for the second consecutive year no Canadian poets made the cut.
The nominees for the $130,000 award for English language poetry are Nigeria’s Gbenga Adesina, Nebraskan Kevin Young, Ethiopian-American Aracelis Girmay, Philadelphian Ange Mlinko, and Americans Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher, who collaborated on a translation of poetry by Chile’s Elvira Hernández.
In 2022, the prize’s Toronto-based founder Scott Griffin controversially merged the $65,000 awards for one Canadian and one international poet into one award. He explained his rationale at the time to The Globe and Mail: “I know there’s going to be some feeling that the elimination of the big Canadian prize is a loss, but Canadian poets were unable to win the international prize and so it was seen as Canadians can’t, don’t measure up.”
Griffin also said there was “nothing to prevent a Canadian poet from winning both awards for the same book.” For whatever reason, the Griffin Poetry Prize sweep of both awards by a Canadian was an unaccomplished feat, and, since 2022, some in the Canadian poetry community have lamented the loss of an annual honour worth $65,000 exclusively to a homegrown poet.
In the three years under the changed format, only one Canadian – the Vancouver-based Irish-Canadian writer George McWhirter – has won the Griffin.
On the prize’s Instagram account earlier this month, Griffin invited feedback from the poetry community on the prize’s current format and said that a town hall on the matter will be held in the future.
The jury that determined this year’s shortlist – Colombian poet/professor Andrea Cote, Canadian poet/librettist Luke Hathaway and American poet/professor Major Jackson – considered 461 books of poetry, including 34 translations from 19 languages, submitted by 219 publishers from 42 different countries.
All the 2026 shortlisters are first-time nominees except Daniel Borzutzky, whose Lake Michigan was a Griffin contender in 2019. This year, he was nominated as a translator with Alec Schumacher on the Elvira Hernández bilingual anthology Bodies Found in Various Places, published by Cardboard House Press. The jury cited Hernández’s writing as “an excavation into collective history and into language itself,” and praised the translators’ conveyance of the author’s layered voice.
The jury described Gbenga Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea, published by University of Nebraska Press, as a book that “unfolds as a choral elegy, an intergenerational song in which migration becomes the passage through which life and death inhabit a single, continuous body.” Adesina is the inaugural Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virg.
Stanford University’s Aracelis Girmay, who is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund, is shortlisted for Green of All Heads, published by BOA Editions. The jury wrote that Girmay “transforms grief and mourning into a way of seeing, as daughter and mother, quintessential truths.”
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University of Florida’s Ange Mlinko was nominated for Foxglovewise, published by Faber & Faber. Her poetry is “playful, layered, and unsentimental,” according to a jury which also noted rhyme that works as a “secret second logic.”
Nominee Kevin Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker. His Night Watch, published by Alfred A. Knopf, was cited as “blues-tinged and hypnotic,” and the most experimental of his 16 books of poetry and prose. His 2021 poetry collection Stones was a finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
One acclaimed Canadian book that failed to make the longlist, let alone the shortlist, is Karen Solie’s Wellwater, which won her the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Poetry and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Solie is a past Griffin winner (for 2009’s Pigeon) and a current Griffin Poetry Prize trustee – a role that renders her work ineligible for consideration. The Moose Jaw native was one of the eight writers this year to win a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, worth US$175,000.
The Griffin Poetry Prize winner will be announced at Toronto’s Koerner Hall on June 3.
In other literary news, the shortlist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, an English-language prize for women and non-binary writers in North America, was announced. The five nominated writers are Julia Elliott, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lee Lai, Megha Majumdar and Sonya Walger. The award will be handed out at a ceremony in Toronto on June 2.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to state that Karen Solie's Wellwater was not eligible for consideration because the author is a Griffin Poetry Prize trustee.