Toronto, ON – November 15, 2006 – Griffin Poetry Prize trustees have selected John Burnside (Scotland), Charles Simic (USA), and Karen Solie (Canada) to be the judges for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize. Their individual and collective experience underlines the Griffin Trust’s stature as a major international poetry prize.
John Burnside’s award-winning poetry collections include The Hoop (1988), winner of the Scottish Arts Council Book Award; Common Knowledge (1991); Feast Days (1992), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; The Asylum Dance (2000) winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award; The Light Trap (2001); and most recently, The Good Neighbour (2005). His new poetry collection, Gift Songs, and a novel, The Devil’s Footprints, will both be published this spring. John Burnside is currently Reader in Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews. He lives in rural Fife, with his wife and two sons. (Click here for additional bio details.)
Charles Simic’s collection Selected Poems: 1963-2003 won the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2005. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems in 1990 and he has twice won the Pen International Translation Award. His other award-winning collections include Jackstraws, named a 1999 New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Walking the Black Cat, which was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award in Poetry. Among his many accomplishments and accolades, Simic was the Guest Editor of The Best American Poetry 1992; he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000; and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1973, Simic has lived in New Hampshire where he is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. (Click here for additional bio details.)
Karen Solie’s first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine, won the BC Book Prize Dorothy Livesay Award and was shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the Gerald Lampert Award, and the ReLit Prize. Her second collection, Modern and Normal, was shortlisted for a Trillium Award and included on The Globe and Mail’s list of the 100 best books of 2005. Solie has twice been named a finalist for National Magazine Awards for poetry. Previously a Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta and on faculty for the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Wired Writing Studio, Solie is currently Writer-in-residence for the University of New Brunswick. She will facilitate the poetry workshop for the Sage Hill Writing Experience this summer, and is a regular book reviewer for The Globe and Mail. (Click here for additional bio details.)
All three judges understand the importance of the Griffin Poetry Prize’s international reach and will consequently call in books of English language poetry from around the world.
Submissions for The Griffin Poetry Prize are accepted up until December 31, 2006. The shortlisted books (four International and three Canadian) will be announced on April 3, 2007 at a press conference in Toronto, Canada.
For more information, contact:
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