About Karen
Karen Solie is published in the U.K. by Picador, in Canada by House of Anansi, and in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her sixth collection of poems, Wellwater, is forthcoming in April. The Caiplie Caves (2019), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Awards for her earlier collections – The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2015), Pigeon (2009), Modern and Normal (2005), and Short Haul Engine (2001) – include the Griffin Prize, the Latner Poetry Prize, and the Canada Council Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for an artist in mid-career. A volume of selected poems, The Living Option (2013), published by Bloodaxe Books, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023. Karen has recently served as Visiting Writer for Massey College at the University of Toronto, as Holloway Visiting Poet for the University of California at Berkeley, and as International Writer in Residence at York University. A former associate director of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts, she has taught poetry at the University of St Andrews since 2022. Karen was born in Moose Jaw, and grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan. She divides her time between Toronto, Newfoundland, and Fife.