Lifetime Recognition

Biography of Don McKay

Don McKay’s books of poetry include Birding, or Desire (1983), Night Field (1991), Apparatus (1997), Another Gravity (2000), Strike/Slip (2006), Paradoxides (2012) and Lurch (2021). Camber: selected poems, appeared in 2004. Five of his books have been nominated for Governor General’s Awards, and two of them—Night Field and Another Gravity—received that award. He has been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize three times and received it for Strike/Slip in 2007. Between 1975 and 2018 he served as co-editor and co-publisher with Brick Books. After teaching English and Creative Writing at the Universities of Western Ontario and New Brunswick for twenty-seven years, he now writes full time. From 1991 to 1997 he edited The Fiddlehead, and he has served as a workshop leader for many institutions and writers’ groups. He was the Associate Director for poetry at the Banff Centre for the Arts for 14 years. His abiding interest in natural history and the environment has led to four books on the poetics of wilderness: Vis à Vis (2001), Deactivated West 100 (2005), The Shell of the Tortoise (2011), and All New Animal Acts (2020). His collected poems, Angular Unconformity, was published in 2014. In 2009 he was named to the Order of Canada.

Don McKay currently makes his home in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Don McKay’s journey through closely observed places and creatures not only brings them alive with great panache, it explores a more humane way of living on earth.

2001 Griffin Poetry Prize Judges