CHICAGO — Poet Gary
Snyder is the winner of the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry
Foundation, the award is one of the most prestigious given to
American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation's
largest literary awards. Christian Wiman, editor of
Poetrymagazine and chair of the selection committee, made the
announcement today. The prize will be presented at an evening
ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago on Thursday, May 29.
In announcing the award, Wiman said: "Gary Snyder is in essence
a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any
one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry
is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our
relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we
forget that relation."
Raised in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder began writing in the
1950s as a member—with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—of the
Beat movement. For most of the 1960s he lived in Japan and
studied formally in a Zen monastery. Blending physical
reality—precise observations of nature—with insight received
primarily through the practice of Zen Buddhism, Snyder has
explored a wide range of social and spiritual matters in both
poetry and prose.
The judges issued the following statement in making the
selection: "Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: there's no
sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world
simply to celebrate his own sensibility. A deeply learned and
meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great
scope as well as intense focus, Snyder has written poems that we
will be reading for as long as we've been reading Robert Frost."
"The selection of Gary Snyder as this year's winner of the Lilly
Prize does honor to the tradition of excellence and importance
that the prize has stood for since it was established over 20
years ago," said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation.
Snyder is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry,
essays, and translations. His poetry collections include Riprap
and Cold Mountain Poems, The Back Country, Regarding Wave, No
Nature, Mountains and Rivers Without End, and Danger on Peaks.
His essays are collected in Earth House Hold, The Real Work, A
Place in Space, and Back on the Fire.
A committed environmental activist who has received the John Hay
Award for Nature Writing, Snyder has also been recognized for
his contributions to the theory and practice of Buddhism. His
many honors include the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle
Island, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the
Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess
Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Robert
Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times,
and the Shelley Memorial Award.
Snyder was born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco. He is
professor emeritus of English at the University of California,
Davis, and lives in northern California.
Judges for the 2008 prize were poets Eavan Boland, Sandra M.
Gilbert, and Christian Wiman.