German poet Durs Grünbein, British translator Karen Leeder win $130K Griffin Poetry Prize
They are recognized for the collection Psyche Running
German poet Durs Grünbein and British translator Karen Leeder have won the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize for the collection Psyche Running.
The $130,000 prize is the world's largest prize for a single book of poetry written in or translated into English. Because the winning book is a translation from German, the Griffin Poetry Prize will allocate 60 per cent of the prize to the translator and 40 per cent to the original poet.
Psyche Running is a collection of selected poems by Grünbein, a celebrated poet who has published more than 30 books of poetry and prose. He has won awards including the Georg Büchner Prize, the Friedrich Nietzsche Prize and the Berlin Literature Prize.
Psyche Running draws on poems from nine of his collections, which explore history through fragmented dreams and a shadow of existentialism.
"I hope poetry is a support to ideas of democracy, humanity, whatever," he said in his acceptance speech. "That's actually my training with poetry. That's why I'm writing poetry."
Grünbein, in addition to his writing, teaches poetics and aesthetics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He lives in Berlin and Rome.
Psyche Running was translated by Leeder, a writer, scholar and translator of German writing. She has translated many of Grünbein's works and has won several prizes for those translations, including the Stephen Spender Prize, the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize.
She is also the Schwarz-Taylor Chair of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.
"Translators and poets and translators are both translating, it seems to me," said Leeder in her acceptance speech.
"But the translators are the little bees who often get forgotten. And one of the extraordinary things about this prize is that it also honours them. So on behalf of bees, thank you very much indeed."
The winner was selected from 578 books of poetry by the jury composed of Canadian author and poet Anne Michaels and international writers Nick Laird and Tomasz Różycki.
"Grünbein's Psyche Running is a brilliant overview and selection of a poet who satisfies our hunger to be serious, as again and again he finds himself 'between words and things,'" said the jury in a press statement.
"Leeder's adept translations establish a new version of Grünbein in English: universal, lyrical, philosophical."
The remaining shortlisted writers were The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, translated from Spanish by Aaron Coleman, Kiss the Eyes of Peace by Tomaž Šalamun, translated from Slovenian by Brian Henry, Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips and Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss. They will each receive $10,000.
The $10,000 Canadian First Book Prize was awarded to Dawn Macdonald for her collection, Northerny.
Canadian poet and writer Margaret Atwood was awarded the $25,000 lifetime achievement award.
Atwood has published over 50 books — poetry, fiction, essays — and is a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.
She began her writing career with poetry, publishing The Circle Game and winning the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in the late 1960s.
She's since published more than a dozen poetry collections, including The Journals of Susanna Moodie in 1970, Power Politics in 1971 and, most recently, Paper Boat in 2024.
Last year's Griffin Poetry Prize winner was Mexican poet Homero Aridjis for Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, translated by Vancouver's George McWhirter. St. John's writer Maggie Burton won the Canadian First Book Prize for her debut poetry collection Chores.
2023 marked the first time the Griffin Poetry Prize gave out a single award. The prize previously awarded $65,000 to two works of English-language poetry from the previous year — one Canadian and one international.
Other past Canadian winners include Tolu Oloruntoba, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Anne Carson, Roo Borson, Dionne Brand and Jordan Abel.
