We’re delighted to share that three of the American editions of our books have been longlisted for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize - congratulations to Carl Phillips, Bei Dao, Jeffrey Yang and Oksana Maksymchuk, whose books Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Strous and Giroux), Sidetracks (New Directions) and Still City: Diary of an Invasion (University of Pittsburgh Press) have all been acknowledged by the judges!

The international Griffin Poetry Prize—the world’s most generous award for a first edition single collection of poetry written in or translated into English—highlights the global nature of poetry and the vital role of translation in bridging cultures and voices worldwide.

Judges Nick Laird (Northern Ireland), Anne Michaels (Canada), and Tomasz Różycki (Poland) each read 578 books of poetry, including 47 translations from 20 languages, submitted by 219 publishers from 17 different countries.

The five shortlisted books will be announced on Wednesday, April 23, 2025. The winner will be announced at the Griffin Poetry Prize Readings to be held at Koerner Hall in Toronto on Wednesday, June 4, and will be awarded $130,000. The other shortlisted finalists will each receive $10,000.

Read the full longlist on the prize website.

Well done to Carl, Bei Dao, Jeffrey, Oksana and all the other poets and publishers on the longlist!

Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowledge that's rooted in (always unstable) human memory. If the poet's recent books have been engaged with the theme of power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the value of embracing it and thus of releasing ourselves from the compulsion to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it really happen? If we believe it didn't, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks through the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition – 'tears were tears', mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn't, the way people live until they don't. And there was also joy. And beauty. 'Yet the world's still so beautiful... Sometimes it is...' It was enough. And it still can be.

Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in fifteen years, is also his first long poem and undoubtedly his magnum opus – the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. 'As a poet, I am always lost,' he once declared. Opening Sidetracks with a prologue of heavenly questions and following on with thirty-four cantos, the poem travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life. From his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, the poem roves through the years of exile living in six countries, back to the rural construction site where he worked during the Cultural Revolution, to the 'sunshine tablecloth' in his kitchen in Davis, California, and his emotional visit home after a thirteen-year separation ('the mother tongue has deepened my foreignness'). The various currents of our times rush into his lifelines, reconfigured through the 'vortex of experience' and the poet's encounters with friends, strangers and with other artists living and dead. He moves from place to place unable to return home.

Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk's debut in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this diary of an invasion recreates the mood and tone of the context within which a poet's imagination must make sense of the change.

Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began 'as a poetic journal I started keeping in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021–22. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood.'