Vancouver poet Tolu Oloruntoba wins 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Judges describe writer’s debut collection, The Junta of Happenstance, as “dazzling”
Tolu Oloruntoba.
LOCAL POET TOLU Oloruntoba is the Canadian winner of the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize for The Junta of Happenstance (Anstruther Books/Palimpsest Press). He receives $65,000 in prize money.
“The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba’s dazzling debut collection, collides the language of revolution with the landscapes of the body,” the judges’ citation reads. “These poems go beyond the desire to ward off death. They emerge out of a life intimate with death’s randomness. Like the vicissitudes of war, Oloruntoba’s poems make peace with accident and fate. They bring breath to survival. ‘If the timeline ahead is/ infinitely longer than the/ knives behind, perhaps/ as we set to mending/ we can heal more/ than we ever undid./ But we, too,/ would like a piece of the plunder.’ These exquisite poems leave an imprint both violent and terrifyingly beautiful.”
The author of chapbook Manubrium, shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award, Oloruntoba practised medicine before taking up writing, managing projects for B.C. health authorities. After a somewhat itinerant life in Nigeria and the United States, he emigrated to the Greater Vancouver area, where he lives with his family in the territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, and Kwantlen First Nations. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, PRISM International, Columbia Journal, Obsidian, and Canadian Literature and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine.
Sho by Douglas Kearney (Wave Books) is the International winner of the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Altadena, California, Kearney teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow. He lives with his family in St. Paul.
Judges Adam Dickinson (Canada), Valzhyna Mort (Belarus), and Claudia Rankine (Jamaica/US) each read 639 books of poetry, including 57 translations from 24 languages, submitted by 236 publishers from 16 different countries.
More information is here.
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