The Griffin Trust was founded in April 2000 by Chairman Scott Griffin, along with Trustees Margaret Atwood, Robert Hass, Michael Ondaatje, Robin Robertson and David Young. In 2004 Carolyn Forché was named a Trustee and joined the list of internationally-acclaimed writers who sit on the board of the Griffin Trust. New trustees have been named as follows: in 2014, Karen Solie, Colm Tóibín and Mark Doty, in 2016, Jo Shapcott and Marek Kazmierski, in 2018, Ian Williams and in 2020, Sarah Howe. Margaret Atwood, Robert Hass, Michael Ondaatje, Robin Robertson, Jo Shapcott and Colm Tóibín have assumed the role of Trustees Emeriti.
SCOTT GRIFFIN is Chairman, Director and controlling shareholder of House of Anansi Press Inc., a Canadian intermediate literary publishing company, publishing fiction, non-fiction and poetry; Chairman and Director of Steam Whistle Brewing; co-Founder, Chairman and Director of The Scott Griffin Foundation; co-Founder of Poetry In Voice/Les voix de la poésie, a national, bilingual poetry recitation contest combining the dynamic aspects of slam poetry, spoken word and theatre with the study of great literature in the high school classroom; and Director, Literary Review of Canada. In 2006, he published a memoir entitled My Heart is Africa about his two-year aviation adventure throughout that continent. His interests include sailing, skiing, flying, English literature and travel to remote places. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario.
MARK DOTY is the author of nine books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008; and Deep Lane, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2015. He has also published five volumes of nonfiction prose, among them Dog Years, which was named a New York Times bestseller in 2007; Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven’s Coast and Firebird. The Art of Description, a handbook for writers, appeared in 2011. He is the first American poet to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K. and his work has been honoured by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. A new book of poems, Deep Lane, will be published in April 2015. He is at work on What is the Grass, a prose meditation on Walt Whitman’s life and poetry. He teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey and lives in New York City.
CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, which received the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, The Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Blue Hour, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has translated Flowers from the Volcano and Sorrow by Claribel Alegria, The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (with William Kulik), and Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (with Munir Akash). She compiled and edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and in 1998, was given the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm for her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. In 2006, she won the Robert Creeley Award, named after the renowned poet and former Griffin Poetry Prize judge who died in March 2005. She teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison, and their son, Sean-Christophe.
SARAH HOWE is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at University College London. Previous honours include a Hawthornden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, as well as fellowships from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She is a Lecturer in Poetry at King’s College London.
PAUL MULDOON was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for more than thirty years. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry including Howdie-Skelp, due from FSG and Faber and Faber in 2021. Among his awards are the 1972 Eric Gregory Award, the 1980 Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Pigott Poetry Prize, the 2017 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry, and the 2020 Michael Marks Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
KAREN SOLIE was born in Moose Jaw, and grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her third, Pigeon, won the 2010 Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. A volume of selected poems, The Living Option, was published in the UK in 2013. She received the 2015 Writers Trust Latner Poetry Prize, and the 2016 Canada Council Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for an artist in mid-career. Solie has taught for writing programs and universities across Canada, and is an associate director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. Her work has been translated into French, German, Korean and Dutch. She lives in Toronto.
ALEŠ ŠTEGER was born in Ptuj, Slovenia. He works as an editor, translator, and initiator of artistic and cultural events, and translates from Germany and Spanish. He has translated or co-translated books by Pablo Neruda, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gottfried Benn, Peter Huchel, Olga Orózco, César Vallego, Ko Un, and Walter Benjamin. Šteger is among the most translated Slovenian authors and his works have been published in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Neue Züurcher Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, TLS, and Lettre International. He has received numerous national and international prizes and honours, and stipends and fellowships. Šteger is a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, the German Academy for language and literature, and a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Arts, and of the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz, Germany.
IAN WILLIAMS is the author of Personals, shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone’s Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada; and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. His first novel, Reproduction, is forthcoming. He was named as one of ten Canadian writers to watch by the CBC. Williams completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and teaches poetry in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. He was the 2014-15 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program. He served as a judge for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Trustees Emeriti
MARGARET ATWOOD’S books have been acclaimed internationally. In a rich and varied career she has authored more than 35 volumes of poetry, fiction and non-fiction and her work has been published in more than 40 languages. Atwood’s newest novels, The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) are follow-ups to her 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake, which was shortlisted for the coveted Booker and Orange Prizes, and longlisted for the IMPAC award. Other recent publications are Moral Disorder, a collection of interconnected short stories; The Door, a volume of poetry, and Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, which won the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award (2009) for Best Non-Fiction Book. Additional titles include the Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada, and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Penelopiad and The Tent. A number of these titles have also been rendered in theatrical, operatic, and television film versions. In 2004, she co-invented the Long Pen™. Among many accolades, Atwood was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters (2008), the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award (2010), and the Nelly Sachs Prize for Literature (2010). She is currently a Vice-President of International PEN. Born in Ottawa, Atwood grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto, where she currently lives. She and her late partner Graeme Gibson were Joint Honorary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within Birdlife International.
ROBERT HASS was US Poet Laureate from 1995-97, a position he used to battle American illiteracy and promote awareness about the environment. Awarded the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley. His most recent volume of poetry, Time and Materials, was honoured with the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. He also published the Best American Poetry 2001 anthology and his books of poetry include Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry entitled Twentieth Century Pleasures. He has co-translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, including A Treatise on Poetry, and he has edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Tranströmer and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. Robert Hass’s deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found the River of Words international art and poetry contest.
MAREK KAZMIERSKI was born and lives in Poland, although he spent most of his life in the UK, where he taught English and creative writing in a range of settings, including prisons and refugee centres. Until recently, he was Managing Editor of Not Shut Up, a quarterly magazine representing unfree art in the UK and abroad. His writing and translations have been published by the likes of 3AM Magazine, the Guardian, Poetry Wales and The White Review, while his short-form autobiography won the 2007 Penguin Decibel Prize. He has worked with the Arts Council, British Council, English PEN, Paul Hamlyn Trust and Southbank Centre on various literary projects, lecturing on outsider arts and coordinating the eMigrating Landscapes academic research project at SSEES (University College London).
Novelist and poet MICHAEL ONDAATJE‘s most recent novel is The Cat’s Table. His Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient was also made into an Oscar-winning film and his book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, was honoured with a 2003 American Cinema Editors Award. His novel Divisadero won the Governor General’s Literary Award (2007); his novel In the Skin of a Lion was named the winner of Canada Reads (2002), has been translated into 10 languages and was the first winner of Ontario’s Trillium Book Award; his novel Anil’s Ghost won the Governor-General’s Literary Award (2000), France’s Prix Medici, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and was named co-winner of the Giller Prize. Coming Through Slaughter, his first novel, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award (1976); his ever-popular fictionalized family history, Running in the Family, was published in 1982. Ondaatje began his writing career as a poet with The Dainty Monsters (1969). He has since published nine other books of poetry, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award (1970); The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. His stage version of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid was performed in Canada, the US and Britain. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and moved to Canada in 1962. He lives in Toronto.
ROBIN ROBERTSON is from the north-east coast of Scotland. He has published six books of poetry and received a number of accolades, including the Petrarca Preis, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and all three Forward Prizes. He has also edited a collection of essays, Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame, translated two plays of Euripides, Medea and the Bacchae, and, in 2006, published The Deleted World, a selection of free English versions of poems by the Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. Hirta Songs – his song cycle about St Kilda, written in collaboration with Alasdair Roberts – was released in 2013. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His selected poems, Sailing the Forest, came out in 2014. The Long Take, his book-length narrative poem, won the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize for Fiction, and was the first poem to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Learn more at www.robinrobertson.co.uk.
JO SHAPCOTT was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected collection entitled Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
COLM TOIBIN was born in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford in 1955 and educated at University College Dublin. He is the author of five novels: The South, (1990) winner of The Irish Times Literature Prize in 1991; The Heather Blazing, winner of the Encore Award for the best second novel in 1992; The Story of the Night (1997); The Blackwater Lightship (1999), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and The Master (2004), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France; and The Testament of Mary (2012), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. Tóibín’s books have been translated into 25 languages.
DAVID YOUNG is the author of the plays Glenn, Inexpressible Island, Clout, Love is Strange and Fire that have been widely produced in Canada, the United States and Europe. In a former life, he was president of the Coach House Press for ten years. David has also published two novels and written extensively for film and television. Young recently completed a screenplay about an armored car heist and is currently adapting Alistair MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief for the stage, to be produced next season in Toronto. In addition, he wrote a six-hour mini-series about medical relief work in the middle of the civil war in south Sudan, which was shot in South Africa. He lives in Toronto.
Photo credits:
Scott Griffin, by Joy von Tiedemann
Robert Hass, by Margaretta Mitchell
Sarah Howe, by Hayley Madden
Marek Kazmierski, by Bogdan Frymorgen
Robin Robertson, by Niall McDiarmid
Ian Williams, by Justin Morris
David Young, courtesy of the Reykjavik International Literary Festival