Canadian poet Karen Solie spent her childhood in “very rural” Saskatchewan, and that experience has shaped her work across poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
“I grew up with land-use and environmental concerns and money issues and all that sort of thing,” she says. “So it kind of grounds what I’m thinking about.”
Solie is a 2023 winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.
“I can’t help but be influenced by climate crisis and economic inequality,” she says.
Solie is currently working on a collection of poetry. After that, she plans a cross-genre research-oriented book, which is the project to be supported by the Guggenheim Fellowship.
“I’m researching a collection of hybrid essays that explore encounters with art, violence, memory, and identity over time. Though it hasn’t been intentional, it’s turned out that they all have something to do with being locked in or confined. I’m looking forward to working in new genres and building on my research background.”
Solie’s work has appeared in journals internationally and has been translated into eight languages. It is included in anthologies including the FSG Poetry Anthology (2021), the Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (2019), the sixth edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2018), and the Forward Book of Poetry 2018. Her most recent collection of poetry, The Caiplie Caves, was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Derek Walcott Prize. She was Writer in Residence for York University in 2023, the Holloway Visiting Poet for the University of California at Berkeley in 2022, and the Jack McClelland Writer in Residence for the University of Toronto in 2021.
Solie says winning the Guggenheim was a “real shock.”
“I knew it was a long shot,” she says. I was very honored to receive that email and then to see the others; not only the poets but the other researchers who had been awarded a Guggenheim – it’s astonishing.”
Solie lives in Toronto but is currently a lecturer in creative writing at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
