TCD Academic Wins Prestigious Poetry Prize
Posted on: 09 June 2010
Associate professor of English at TCD’s School of English and poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was recently named the International winner of the prestigious Canada based Griffin Poetry Prize for her collection, The Sun-fish. The judging panel, made up of distinguished writers and poets including Canadian poet and previous Griffin Prize winner Anne Carson, Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie and American poet Carl Phillips, chose her collection from almost 400 entries received from 12 countries.
The awards ceremony was preceded by a sold out event for more than 1,000 people where each of the shortlisted poets read excerpts from their books. Speaking about Eiléan’s achievement, Head of the School of English at TCD Dr Darryl Jones said: “The Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious international awards for poetry and has been won by many of the foremost living poets. The award of this year’s Griffin Prize to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin affirms her eminent position amongst contemporary poets. Congratultions to Eiléan on this magnificent achievement!’
Scott Griffin congratulates the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize winners, Karen Solie and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the author of several previous books of poetry and a member of Aosdána. She has won numerous awards including the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the prestigious O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award by The Irish American Cultural Institute which called her among the best poets of her generation. Ní Chuilleanáin has also acted as a periodical editor on the Irish literary scene and since 1975 she has been an editor and publisher of Cyphers, Ireland’s longest established literary periodical, and more recently has accepted the position of current editor of Poetry Ireland Review.
The four international shortlisted poets were John Glenday with his collection Grain, published by Picador; Louise Glück’s A Village Life, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Sun-fish, published by The Gallery Press and Susan Wick’s translation of Cold Spring in Winter by Valérie Rouzeau, published by Arc Publications. The Canadian winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize was Karen Solie for her collection, Pigeon. The other poets on the Canadian shortlist were Kate Hall of Montreal, who was nominated for her debut, The Certainty Dream, and the late P K Page, for Coal and Roses.
The Griffin Poetry Prize was founded in 2000 by industrialist and philanthropist Scott Griffin to serve and encourage excellence in poetry and is awarded annually to two first edition books of poetry written in, or translated into, English, and submitted from anywhere in the world. To mark the tenth anniversary of the prize, the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry doubled the annual prize money to a cumulative amount of $200,000 which included $65,000 for both Ní Chuilleanáin and Solie and $10,000 for each of the shortlisted poets who participated in the readings. Past International winners include Paul Muldoon (2003), Charles Simic (2005), John Ashbery (2008) and C D Wright (2009), while past Canadian winners include Christian Bök (2002), Margaret Avison (2003), Roo Borson (2005) and A F Moritz (2009) who won for The Sentinel.