The best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured each year with the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world's most prestigious and valuable literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has acted as a tremendous spur to interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English. The judges for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize are Heather McHugh, David O'Meara, and Fiona Sampson. And each year the editor of The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology gathers the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

Royalties generated from The 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology will be donated to UNESCO's World Poetry Day, which was created to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard in their communities.

Heather McHugh's books of poetry include the Pulitzer Prize finalist Eyeshot; the National Book Award finalist and Bingham Poetry Prize winner Hinge & Sign: Poems 1963-1993; and the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning translation (with Nikolai Popov) Glottal Stop 101: Poems of Paul Celan. McHugh was Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and is currently Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is also a fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Heather McHugh's profile page

David O'Meara was born in Pembroke, Ontario. He is the author of three collections of poetry, and a play, Disaster. His most recent book is Noble Gas, Penny Black. His work has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including The New Canon, and The Echoing Years, a co-Irish/Canadian anthology. He has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Prize, the Trillium Prize, a National Magazine Award, four Rideau Awards (theatre), and was twice winner of the Archibald Lampman Award. He is director of the renowned Plan 99 Reading Series, a founding director of VerseFest, Canada's International Poetry Festival, and will be poetry instructor at the Banff Centre in September 2012. He continues to tend bar at the Manx Pub in Ottawa.

David O'Meara's profile page

Fiona Sampson is a poet, essayist, and critic whose most recent books include a new edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Music Lessons: The Newcastle Poetry Lectures. Published in more than thirty languages, she has eleven books in translation, including Patuvachki Dnevnik, which was awarded the Zlaten Prsten. In 2009, she received a Cholmondeley Award and was elected an FRSL; she has since been elected to the Council of the Royal Society of Literature. She has received the Newdigate Prize, Writer's Awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales and from the Society of Authors and has been shortlisted twice for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prizes. She is currently Distinguished Writer at the University of Kingston and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of London. Her critical survey of contemporary British poetry, Beyond the Lyric will appear in autumn 2012.

Fiona Sampson's profile page