Gbenga Adesina has made the shortlist for the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize. His debut collection, Death Does Not End at the Sea (University of Nebraska Press), is one of five books selected by this year’s judges from 461 submitted titles — a field that included 34 translations from 19 languages, submitted by 219 publishers across 42 countries. We covered his longlisting earlier this month, and the shortlist confirms what that recognition already suggested: this is a book that demands serious attention.

The Griffin Poetry Prize is the largest international prize for a single collection written in or translated into English, worth C$130,000. The four other shortlisted poets each receive C$10,000.

The judges Andrea Cote of Colombia, Luke Hathaway of Canada, and Major Jackson of the United States, described Adesina’s collection in terms that capture what makes it so distinctive. Their citation reads: “This book unfolds as a choral elegy, an intergenerational song in which migration becomes the passage through which life and death inhabit a single, continuous body. With lyrical precision and a striking imagistic field, its rhythm moves through calibrated variation, guided by supplication and invocation — a call to ‘the spectral multitude’ who, in the world, orient themselves through pain. Compassionate and attuned to the urgencies of the present, Adesina’s voice is a clear, tempered thread, carrying us from one shore of night to the other.”

Adesina is a Nigerian poet and essayist currently serving as the inaugural Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University. He received his MFA from New York University, where he was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa, and is the co-founder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry, among others. Death Does Not End at the Sea is his first full-length collection.

The full shortlist also includes Bodies Found in Various Places by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher, translated from the Spanish of Elvira Hernández (Cardboard House Press); Green of All Heads by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions); Foxglovewise by Ange Mlinko (Faber & Faber); and Night Watch by Kevin Young (Alfred A. Knopf).

The winner will be announced at the Griffin readings at Koerner Hall in Toronto on Wednesday, June 3, 2026. The evening will also include the Lifetime Recognition Award recipient, to be announced May 6, and the Canadian First Book Prize winner, to be announced May 20. Tickets are on sale now.