Conferred in Toronto on June 5, the 2014 International and Canadian winners of Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize are, respectively, Brenda Hillman, for her collection Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, and Anne Carson, for Red Doc>, a follow-up-of-sorts to her 1998 novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red. Both winners received a prize of C$65,000. Founded in 2000, the Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the world’s biggest for single works of poetry. This year’s panel of judges consisted of C. D. Wright of the United States, Robert Bringhurst of Canada, and Jo Shapcott of the UK. Carson also won the award in its very first year, for her collection Men in the Off Hours.

The international shortlist for this prize included Rachael Boast’s Pilgrim’s Flower, Carl Phillips’s Silverchest, and Mira Rosenthal’s translation of Colonies from Polish writer Tomasz Rózycki. The Canadian shortlist entries included Sue Goyette’s Ocean and Anne Michaels’s Correspondences. At a reading event in Toronto on June 4, judge and prize trustee Carolyn Forché presented each of the finalists with a C$10,000 honorarium and a leather-bound edition of their book.

The awards ceremony was hosted by Scott Griffin, founder of the prize, and several highly acclaimed writers, including Carolyn Forché, Robert Hass, and Colm Tóibín. Previous winners of this award include C. D. Wright, Charles Simic, Ghassan Zaqtan, Alice Notley, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Christian Bök, and John Ashbery.

Read excerpts from the winning works and the finalists, and learn more at Griffin Poetry Prize.

Photo: (left to right) Anne Carson, Scott Griffin (prize founder), and Brenda Hillman