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Ken Babstock (born 1970 in Newfoundland, Canada) was not yet forty years old when he was named one of Canada’s ten best living English-speaking poets in 2009. His latest collection, from which he will be reading for Weltklang, has brought him his second nomination for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the world’s most valuable prize for poetry.
Nominating him for the 2007 Griffin Prize, the judges wrote, “Here we find a poet who can do almost anything, both formally and in his exploration of such subject matter as romantic love, landscape, the body, the city, physical pain and a joyful awareness of the sensory details of a world full of marvels and riddles. Yet no matter what his subject matter is, or how he chooses to approach it, he never settles for effect: Babstock can be terse, darkly funny, tender, elegiac, wise, mysterious, but he is always fresh and always honest.”
Babstock grew up as a vicar’s son in Pembroke in the Ottawa Valley. His involvement with poetry began in his teens. After dropping out of Concordia University, Montreal, he worked for twelve years in forests and factories and on building sites in Ireland and Canada.
His first collection of poetry was published in 1999 by the renowned House of Anansi Press in Toronto, which has remained his publisher since and for which he now works as poetry editor. His subsequent three volumes, Days into Flatspin (2001), Airstream Land Yacht (2006) and Methodist Hatchet (2011), were all highly praised in the Canadian Press – comparisons have been drawn between Babstock and W. H. Auden.
He is currently a guest of the Berlin Artists’ Programme of the DAAD.