Assistant Professor of Literatures in English Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected has won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize:
"TORONTO – Wednesday, June 23, 2021 – Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and The Dyzgraphxst by Canisia Lubrin (McClelland & Stewart) are the International and Canadian winners of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize."
Read the full news release here.
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus, and she writes in English and Belarusian. She is the author of three collections of poetry in English, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011) and, most recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which has been named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2020 by The New York Times and NPR. She also has two full-length poetry collections in Belarusian, 'Я тоненькая як твае вейкі' ('I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes', Lohvinau, 2005) and 'Эпідэмія Ружаў' ('Epidemic of Roses', Lohvinau, 2017), which have been published in translation in Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine.
Her work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation fellowship, the Amy Clampitt fellowship, and the Bess Hoskins Prize for Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Granta, and many more. Mort translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, Air Raid (Ugly Duckling 2021). With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Valzhyna Mort’s poetry collections have come out in translation in Germany, Sweden and Ukraine, while single poems have been translated into a dozen of languages. Outside the US, she has received the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors (Germany) and the Crystal of Vilenica prize (Slovenia).
