Anne Michaels

Born on April 15, 1958, in Toronto, Ontario, Anne Michaels is the daughter of Isaiah Michaels, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who had come to Canada in 1931 at the age of thirteen and left behind relatives who would not survive the war. She took an honours degree in English at the University of Toronto, where she later joined the English department as an adjunct, and for years supported herself teaching creative writing while she wrote poems. Her first collection, The Weight of Oranges (1986), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas, and Miner's Pond (1991) won the Canadian Authors Association Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award; both books, thick with Rodin, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Marie Curie, set out the precision and moral seriousness that run through everything she has written since. Her first novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), the fruit of some ten years of research, follows Jakob Beer, a Jewish boy from Poland pulled from the mud by a Greek geologist, and the younger man who later reads his notebooks. It won the Trillium Book Award, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Lannan Literary Award, and was filmed by Jeremy Podeswa. Skin Divers, her third book of poems, followed in 1999, and thirteen years passed between the first novel and the second, The Winter Vault (2009), set amid the flooding of the Nile valley for the Aswan Dam and the rebuilding of postwar Warsaw, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Correspondences (2013), a book-length elegy for her father, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and with John Berger she made Railtracks. She became Toronto's poet laureate in 2015, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and wrote the Miss Petitfour stories for children. Her third novel, Held (2023), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Giller Prize in 2024, and her work has been translated into more than forty-five languages.

On the night of November 18, 2024, Michaels accepted the Giller Prize for Held in a ballroom of the Park Hyatt in Toronto while protesters gathered outside and several writers boycotted the evening. She asked for unity among all the arts and said that everything she writes is a form of witness, against war, indifference and amnesia of every sort.