Griffin Prize to be handed out tonight as Atwood receives lifetime achievement award

By Canadian Press on June 4, 2025.

TORONTO — The Griffin Poetry Prize is due to be handed out in Toronto tonight, where Margaret Atwood is set to accept a lifetime achievement award.

Three translated and two original collections are in contention for the $130,000 award, which the Griffin Trust for Excellency in Poetry bills as the world’s largest prize for a single poetry collection.

Meanwhile, Atwood will receive the Griffin’s Lifetime Recognition Award and will be interviewed onstage by American poet Carolyn Forché.

Atwood is best known for novels including “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but she started her career in poetry and has published 19 collections.

The ceremony will also feature readings from the Griffin Poetry Prize finalists, who, for the first time in the award’s 25-year history, all hail from outside of Canada.

The Griffin was originally separated into categories — one for Canadian talent and another for international contenders — but in 2023 the organization merged the two awards into a single prize open to all poets.

This year’s finalists include “The Great Zoo,” translated by Aaron Coleman from Nicolas Guillen’s original Spanish; “Kiss the Eyes of Peace,” translated by Brian Henry from the original Slovenian by Tomaž Šalamun; and “Psyche Running,” translated by Karen Leeder from the German by Durs Grünbein.

Rounding out the short list are Pulitzer Prize winners Carl Phillips for “Scattered Snows, to the North,” and Diane Seuss for “Modern Poetry.”

If a translated work wins, the translator receives 60 per cent of the prize money and the poet or their estate receives 40 per cent.

The ceremony is set to get underway at 7:30 p.m.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 4, 2025.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press