George McWhirter & Homero Aridjis

Griffin Literary Prize 2024

George McWhirter, Canada/Northern Ireland

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence winner

translated from the Spanish written by

Homero Aridjis, MEXICO

New Directions Publishing, USA

We know that these two men, almost the same age (Aridjis, born in 1940 is 6 months younger than McWhirter), have just won the Giller Prize that is worth $130,000 (Canadian). What is not explained  well is that the prize money is shared by writer and translator.Sixty per cent goes to the translator and the 40% to the writer (poet).

Because I know both men well, they are my friends, I have a feeling that they are going to go 50/50 on this.

I have discovered that here in Vancouver if you ask just about anybody to tell you who was the first Vancouver Poet Laureate few will know that it was George McWhirter in 2007.

While McWhirter was able to go this past Monday to be present in Toronto for the prize announcement, Aridjis had some stomach problems and had to be hospitalized. I hope that by now he is home.

Since both Aridjis and McWhirter are poets and both have written novels I find that reading their novels has me re-reading paragraphs and lines that are so poetically lovely that I want to go at them again.

I have a phone conversation almost every week with McWhirter whose Spanish is pretty good. I like to test him for fun. Recently he gave me a lovely excuse for not being able to talk with him on the phone. "Alex we just got back from Sook and we are unpacking. I cannot talk with you now."

In the photograph that I took of Aridjis back in October 2023 at his home, I was able to share an interesting piece of sort of Canadian trivia. When I read for a third time Julio Cortázar’s Rayueala (Hopscoth), a difficult novel, his protagonist is feeling the cold during a Paris winter. He buys a flannel shirt much like the one being worn by Aridjis. Cortázar calls it “una canadiense”.

Because Aridjis is from the town of Contepec in the state of Michoacán, for years he knew something we Canadians knew nothing about. This is how Aridjis put to me in his poetic way, “Alex we did not know where those monarch butterflies were coming from. But we knew where they were going. They were going to my town and they would spend our winter on the Oyamel trees (a kind of fir tree). And you Canadians did not know where your monarchs were going.”