The shortlist has been selected for the 2026 Plutarch Award, sponsored by Biographers International Organization and the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. The winner will be announced during the BIO Conference, May 28 and 29, in New York City.
The finalists:
Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French (Liveright)
Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West by Max Perry Mueller (Basic Books)
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade (Scribner)
The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life by Graham Watson (Pegasus Books)
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The shortlist has been selection for the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize. The winner will be named June 3 and receive C$130,000 (about US$94,930), while the other shortlisted authors each get C$10,000 (about US$7,300).
The shortlist:
Gbenga Adesina for Death Does Not End at the Sea (University of Nebraska Press)
Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher for their translation from the Spanish of Bodies Found in Various Places by Elvira Hernández (Cardboard House Press)
Aracelis Girmay for Green of All Heads (BOA Editions)
Ange Mlinko for Foxglovewise (Faber & Faber)
Kevin Young for Night Watch (Knopf)