George McWhirter won the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize, which is designed to "encourage and celebrate excellence in poetry," for his translation from the Spanish of Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence by Mexican poet Homero Aridjis. The international prize of C$130,000 (about $94,480) is shared 60% to the translator, 40% to the original author. Each of the other finalists receives C$10,000 (about US$7,265)
The judges' citation noted: "Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence brings poet-translator George McWhirter's adept English to the service of a great world-poet, Homero Aridjis. The book's enchanting variety of tones and subjects expresses a rounded human being engaged with our total experience, from the familial to the political, from bodily sensations to dream, vision, philosophic thought, and history, from hope to foreboding. A keynote is the sense of a person speaking with us plainly and yet from kinship with a light that bathes, and springs from, each thing."
Don McKay won the C$25,000 (about $18,170) Lifetime Recognition Award, nominated by the trustees of the international Griffin Poetry Prize. As reported here last week, Maggie Burton took the C$10,000 Canadian First Book Prize for Chores.