Dunya Mikhail has won a place on the International Shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2006 for Th War Works Hard. The C$100,000 prize is the most lucrative to accept books of poetry from any country in the world - exemplifying the international spirit of the form. The prize is awarded annually for the two best books of poetry, including translations, published in English in the previous year.

The judges' citation read as follows.

"We know that Dunya Mikhail was raised in Saddam's Iraq and sent into exile to follow the news of its devastation from afar. So the very first line of The War Works Hard comes as a surprise: 'What good luck!' The second line crystallizes both the contemporary reality and Mikhail's sensibility: 'She has found his bones.' In her poems, war is a monstrous fact of ordinary life, and her particular skill is the invention of unadorned images that capture the often unexpected human responses. Brecht wrote, 'We'd all be human if we could,' and Mikhail, despite all the contrary evidence, shows that we can, and sometimes are. These are political poems without political rhetoric, Arabic poems without Arabic poetical flourishes, an exile's letter with neither nostalgia nor self-pity, an excavation of the ruins of her homeland where the Sumerian goddess Inana is followed on the next page by the little American devil Lynndie England. In Elizabeth Winslow's perfect translations, poetry takes on its ancient function of restoring meaning to the language. Here is the war in Iraq in English without a single lie."

The War Works Hard will be published by Carcanet in July