Griffin Poetry Prize 2025 shortlist announced

Carl Phillips and Nicolás Guillén are on the Griffin Poetry Prize 2025 shortlist announced in Toronto, Canada, on Wednesday, April 23, 2025.

The Griffin Poetry Prize is the world’s largest international prize for a first edition single collection of poetry written in or translated into English. The Canada-based prize was founded by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin in 2000. The award has geographical categories, with one for a Canadian poet and one for an international poet who writes in English. Some previous winners have been Anne Carson, Nikolai Popov, Kamau Brathwaite, Canisia Lubrin, Tolu Oloruntoba, Douglas Kearney, and Roger Reeves. Ishion Hutchinson won the 2024 edition.

The 2025 jury is comprised of Anne Michaels, a Canadian poet and novelist; Nick Laird, a Northern Irish poet and novelist; and Tomasz Różycki, a Polish poet, translator, and essayist. They announced the longlist on March 19 before the shortlist was revealed on April 23. The shortlist features the following writers of African descent;

• The Great Zoo, written by Nicolás Guillén, translated from the Spanish by Aaron Coleman, University of Chicago Press/Phoenix Poets Series

Judges’ Citation: The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén is one of the masterpieces of Latin American poetry. Originally published in Spanish in 1967 and translated by Aaron Coleman with a subtle understanding of the contexts of colonial oppression and exoticism, this bilingual edition remains a relevant commentary on our times. The Great Zoo seeks to integrate history, society, nature, and dreams into the territories of this singular park. It is not only an atypical bestiary of nonsensical and imprecatory zoography, not only a humorous book of fables with strange morals, but also a surprising essay of social criticism that mocks the taxonomic and classificatory pride of man pretending to gather, in cages, the living complexity of nature. The zoo’s fauna comprises ideas, emotions, phenomena, anthropomorphized animals, and men who are animals; the descriptions of the species are masterpieces of suggestion, working on our imagination with great force. The book, entertaining and moving, is simply beautiful.

• Scattered Snows, to the North, Carl Phillips, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Judges’ Citation: It is Carl Phillips’ mastery that these poems measure, weigh, question, prevaricate: “it seemed,” “maybe,” “what if,” “it’s hard, these days, to know for sure what’s true,” “We weren’t afraid. Nor / unafraid.” And it is Phillips’ magic that this diction renders greater precision, not less; an astonishing accuracy in naming the liminal space from which our comprehension, acceptance, farewells, memories emerge and submerge again. Phillips has found a way to articulate love in all its assertions and disguises—calibrated in all its doubt, tenderness, forms of desire, loyalty, solitudes. In the poem “Stop Shaking,” he writes: “I keep making the same avoidable / few mistakes that I’ve always made, and then regretting them, / and then regretting them less.” In tone and diction, these poems never stray across the line between honesty and privacy. How grateful the reader is to enter and re-enter these poems, to be entered by them. For in their articulation of what is most elusive—what we cannot understand and also somehow know—in their recognition of unanswerable human limitation, is a kind of forgiveness.

The winner, awarded a $130,000 cash prize, will be announced at the Griffin Poetry Prize Readings at Koerner Hall in Toronto on Wednesday, June 4. The other shortlisted finalists will each receive $10,000.