2024 Judges
A. F. Moritz
A. F. Moritz was born on April 15, 1947, in Niles, Ohio, USA, and educated at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from which he received a Ph.D. in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British poetry. His most recent books of poems are The Garden: a poem and an essay (2021), As Far As You Know (2020), and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018). He has published 20 books of poems and his poetry has received various recognitions including the Guggenheim Fellowship; inclusion in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets; the Ingram Merrill Fellowship; the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Bess Hokin Prize of Poetry magazine; the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award of the Southwest Review; the ReLit Award; the Griffin Poetry Prize; the Raymond Souster Award of the League of Canadian Poets, and selection to the Colleción Legítima Defensa of the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas (Mexico; distinguished foreign authors in translation). He is a three-time finalist for the Governor General’s Award for English language poetry for his books Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1999), The Sentinel (2008), and The New Measures (2012); his book As Far As You Know (2020) was a finalist for the Ontario Trillium Award. In January 2019 he was selected Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto and served in that role until May 2023.
Jan Wagner
Jan Wagner was born in 1971 in Hamburg and has lived in Berlin since 1995. Poet, essayist, translator of Anglophone poetry (Charles Simic, James Tate, Margaret Atwood, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, Robin Robertson, Jo Shapcott, Sujata Bhatt, and many others) he was, until 2003, a co-publisher of the international literature box Die Aussenseite des Elementes (“The Outside of the Element”).
Wagner has published eight poetry collections since 2001, most recently Steine & Erden (2023) and Die Live Butterfly Show (2018). Regentonnentonnenvariationen (“Rain Barrel Variations”), his sixth collection, won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2015; Selected Poems 2001-2015 was published in 2016.
Wagner’s poetry has been translated into more than forty languages. A selection in English (Self-Portrait With a Swarm of Bees: Selected Poems, translated by Iain Galbraith) was published in 2015; another English selection, translated by David Keplinger, came out in 2017 under the title The Art of Topiary: Selected Poems. Other books appeared in Italy (Variazioni su un barile di pioggia, 2019), France (Les Variations de la Citerne, 2019), in Sweden, Greece, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, China, Norway, Serbia, Ukraine, Brazil, Chile, Slovenia, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
Wagner has received various literary awards, among them the Anna Seghers Prize (2004), the Ernst Meister Prize for Poetry (2005), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011), the Mörike Award (2015), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (2015), the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize (China, 2017), the Georg Büchner Prize (2017), the Max Jacob Prize (France, 2020) and the PONT International Literary Prize for Intercultural Cooperation (Slovenia, 2021). He is a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature.
Photo credit: Nadine Kunath
Anne Waldman
Poet, curator, professor, performer, and cultural activist Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University. She is the author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics, and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment which won the PEN Center Literary Award.
Waldman has read in the streets as well as at numerous larger venues, such as the Dodge Literary Festival in the USA, the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, and the T. S. Eliot Memorial Foundation at Harvard University. She continues to teach poetics all over the world.
Her album SCIAMACHY was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and the Levy-Gorvy Gallery and has been described by Patti Smith as “exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.” Waldman was the keynote speaker for the Bob Dylan and the Beats Conference in Tulsa in spring, 2022. She wrote the libretto for the critically acclaimed opera/movie Black Lodge, featuring music by composer David T. Little, which premiered at Opera Philadelphia in October 2022. Publishers Weekly has called Anne Waldman a “counter-cultural giant.” Waldman is most recently the author of Bard, Kinetic (2023) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (2022). She is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets.
Photo credit: Nina Subin
The Prize
A History of Excellence
The Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the world’s most generous poetry awards. In celebration of the Prize’s two-decade anniversary it announced its largest award to date, combining the existing International and Canadian prizes into one major prize. As of 2023, the prize is worth C$130,000, making it the world’s largest international prize for a single book of poetry written in, or translated into English. The other shortlisted poets each receive C$10,000.
Additionally, a new C$10,000 prize will be awarded in June 2023 for a Canadian First Book of poetry, along with a six-week residency in Italy in partnership with the Civitella Ranieri Foundation to a Canadian Citizen, or permanent resident, for a first book written in English.
A Lifetime Recognition Award is awarded by the trustees in the sum of C$25,000.
Explore the 22-year history of the Griffin Poetry Prize here.
The Griffin Poetry Prize has been acknowledging and encouraging poets for twenty-two years. At a time when censorship and attacks on a diverse array of writers are on the rise in many countries – including the United States – it’s heartening to see such a strong vote of confidence in poets coming from Canada. Poetry is not a minor art form; it is the crucible of human language.
Margaret Atwood, Founding Trustee