Lisa Robertson

Lisa Robertson (born July 22, 1961) is a Canadian poet, essayist and translator. She lives in France.

Life and work Born in Toronto, Ontario, Robertson moved to British Columbia in 1979, first living on Saltspring Island, then in Vancouver, where studied English literature and art history as a mature student at Simon Fraser University (1984–1988) before leaving the university without a degree to become an independent bookseller (1988–1994). She owned Proprioception Books, a bookstore in downtown Vancouver specializing in poetry, theory and criticism, where she also hosted readings. During the 90s, she was also a member of The Kootenay School of Writing, which was a writer-run collective, and Artspeak Gallery. She began to publish and work collectively in this community of poets and artists. Her first book was a chapbook, The Apothecary, published by Tsunami Editions in 1991. Since then she has published nine books of poetry, three books of essays, and two novels. Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, her 2021 book, contains Robertson's translations of Simone Weil's 1941 essay "What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of" and the 12th C poem "Lark" by Bernart de Ventadorn, as well as extensive annotations, an introductory essay, and archival material.

In 2006, Robertson was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley. In 2017 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, and in 2018 she received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award. Her literary archive is housed at Simon Fraser University Library's Special Collections.

Her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, was published by Coach House Books in January 2020. It was a finalist for the ReLit Award for fiction in 2021, and for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2020 Governor General's Awards. It was published in Jeannot Clair's French translation by Le Quartanier, in 2023, as well as in Swedish, by OEI. Riverwork, her second novel, was published by Coach House Books in 2026.

Her poetry collection Boat, a long poem extended and republished once each decade since 2003, when it began as a chapbook called Rousseau's Boat (Nomados Press), was shortlisted for the 2023 Pat Lowther Award.

Selected bibliography The Apothecary (Vancouver, BC: Tsunami, 1991; reissued 2001; reissued 2007 by BookThug) Cinema Of the Present (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014) 3 Summers (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2016) Starlings (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2018) Proverbs of a She-Dandy (Paris/Vancouver: Libraries Editeurs, 2018) Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship (London: Bookworks, 2019) The Baudelaire Fractal (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2020) Riverwork (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2026) Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (Amsterdam: If I Can't Dance, 2021) Boat (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2022)

Selected essays "Coasting" with Jeff Derksen, Nancy Shaw, and Catriona Strang. Telling it Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Ed. Mark Wallace. (Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2002) "The Weather: A Report on Sincerity," from DC Poetry Anthology 2001. "How Pastoral: A Manifesto." A Poetics of Criticism. Ed. Juliana Spahr. (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994) "My Eighteeneth Century." Assembling Alternatives. Ed. Romana Huk. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003) "On Palinode." Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (2006) "Notes, Murmurations: The Notebook as Form of Rime" Draught, 2025 https://www.draughtjournal.com/article/notes-murmurations