THE WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZES x LIT HUB PODCAST RETURNS FOR A FIFTH SEASON TO CELEBRATE 2025 RECIPIENTS INCLUDING ANNE ENRIGHT, SIGRID NUNEZ AND ROY WILLIAMS

Yale University, New Haven, 28 May 2025

The Windham-Campbell Prizes have announced that a fifth season of the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast will launch on 4 June 2025, as part of an ongoing partnership with literary website Lit Hub.

The new season will comprise eight episodes, each featuring one of this year’s recipients: for Fiction, Sigrid Nunez and Anne Enright; for Nonfiction, Patricia J. Williams and Rana Dasgupta; for Drama, Roy Williams and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini; and for Poetry, Anthony V. Capildeo and Tongo Eisen-Martin. 

Hosted by Mike Kelleher, Director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, each episode sees a prize recipient reveals insights into their writing lives and careers to date, as they dive into the books and plays they love. 

The first episode launches on 4 June, with a new episode releasing every two weeks.

–        Tongo Eisen-Martin discusses The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah’s story of conflict and regeneration depicting a group that seeks to replace the toxic ignorance breeding ethnic, class and caste divisions with the healing knowledge of African unity in late nineteenth-century Africa

–        Sigrid Nunez explores The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece of the Jazz Age and the American dream, which displays the hope and disillusion of a tragic pursuit of the past and the power of romantic imagination

–        Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini considers Gone Too Far!, Bola Agbaje’s comic, astute play about identity, history and culture that depicts a world where respect is always demanded but rarely freely given

–        Patricia J. Williams examines The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir by historian Martha S. Jones, a lyrical, deeply felt meditation of the fundamental matters on Black identity, belonging and family that spans centuries and geographies

–        Roy Williams discusses Dael Orlandersmith’s play Yellowman, a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Drama portraying the racial tensions in the 1960s Deep South that fracture communities and individual lives

–        Anthony V. Capildeo explores An Interesting Detail, Kimberly Campanello’s poetry collection confronting our shared, layered past and its knotty relationship to the present, stretching from today to prehistory, in a voice that is knowing and yearning, sincere and sardonic, and at times defiant

–        Rana Dasgupta considers Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, which captures a precise political moment in 1860, as an old order collapses and revolutionary troops explode into the opulent world of the Sicilian aristocracy

–        Anne Enright examines J.G. Farrell’s novel Troubles, winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize, set in a dilapidated hotel on Ireland’s west coast, where madness and brutality have begun to reign amid the political upheaval of the Irish War of Independence

The Windham-Campbell Prizes

The Windham-Campbell Prizes are a major global prize that recognises eight writers each year for literary achievement across four categories – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. With annual prize money exceeding $1.4m USD – and total prize money awarded over the past decade at over $18m USD – they are one of the most significant prizes in the world. Each recipient is gifted an unrestricted grant to support their writing and allow them to focus on their work independent of financial concerns rewarding each with $175,000.

Previous recipients include Hanif Abdurraqib (Nonfiction, United States, 2024), Christina Sharpe (Nonfiction, Canada, 2024), m. nourbeSe philip (Poetry, Canada/Trinidad and Tobago, 2024), Percival Everett (Fiction, United States, 2023), Tsitsi Dangarembga(Fiction, Zimbabwe, 2022), Margo Jefferson (Nonfiction, United States, 2022), Vivian Gornick (Nonfiction, United States, 2021), Bhanu Kapil (Poetry, United Kingdom, 2020), Kwame Dawes (Poetry, United States, Jamaica, Ghana, 2019), Cathy Park Hong (Poetry, United States, 2018), Lorna Goodison (Poetry, Jamaica/Canada, 2018), Suzan-Lori Parks (Drama, United States, 2018), Marina Carr(Drama, Ireland, 2017), C. E. Morgan (Fiction, United States, 2016), Helen Garner (Nonfiction, Australia, 2016), Edmund de Waal(Nonfiction, United Kingdom, 2015), Teju Cole (Fiction, United States/Nigeria, 2015), Helon Habila (Fiction, Nigeria, 2015), Pankaj Mishra (Fiction, India, 2014), Jeremy Scahill (Nonfiction, United States, 2013) and James Salter (Fiction, United States, 2013).

The Prizes were the brainchild of lifelong partners Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell. The couple were deeply involved in literary circles, collected books avidly, read voraciously as well as penning various works. For years they had discussed the idea of creating an award to highlight literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. When Campbell passed away unexpectedly in 1988, Windham took on the responsibility for making this shared dream a reality. The first prizes were announced in 2013.

The Prizes are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and nominees for the Prizes are considered by judges who remain anonymous before and after the prize announcement. Recipients write in the English language and may live in any part of the world.

The Podcast

The podcast is available https://link.chtbl.com/wcpodcast or via your preferred platform.

www.windhamcampbell.org  | @WindhamCampbell

THE WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZE RECIPIENTS

FICTION

Anne Enright (Ireland)

“The sense of unreality has not left me since the news came in—what an astonishing thing to drop out of a clear blue sky. I am floored by the Windham-Campbell Prize’s generosity and goodwill.”

The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015-2018), writer Anne Enright was born in Dublin. Throughout her formidable body of work, which includes eight novels and two short story collections, Enright has explored the theme of the family in ways that feel nothing short of momentous. Her domestic portraits are startingly potent in that they contain within them all the most pressing issues of our time—from suicide to changing sexual norms and environmental collapse. In her Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Gathering (2007), Enright displays the majestic heights of her prose in depictions of intergenerational wounds and reparations. Many critics have rushed to sing Enright’s praise describing her novels as elegant studies of all that remains unsaid between intimates. Hailed as a master of her form, Enright’s deceptively simple language reveals powerful associations. In The Green Road (2015), an innocuous description of local town shops includes a butcher’s, “his trays of meat fenced around by bloodstained plastic grass.” As a writer, Enright has always refused categorization leading to an inventive prose all her own. With her iconoclastic daring, Enright is skillfully able to wield shifts in narrative styles, viewpoints, and time to echo the true-to-life nature of consciousness and memory.

Sigrid Nunez (United States)

“I am giddy with joy and gratitude to think that I’ll be a recipient of this amazingly distinguished and generous prize!”

A lifelong New Yorker, Sigrid Nunez is the author of ten books, including the National Book Award-winning novel The Friend (2018), which has been celebrated by the New York Times as one of the 100 best books of the 21st Century. Reaching beyond the confines of traditional plot and character development, Nunez’s fiction collages autobiography and imagination into universal portraits of the human experience. In her recent work, including The Vulnerables (2023) and What Are You Going Through (2020), Nunez’s unnamed narrators engage with grief and loss. Yet, buoyed by the author’s humor and masterful storytelling, readers are left feeling a profound sense of connection rather than isolation. Mentored by the literary luminaries Susan Sontag and Elizabeth Hardwick, and a dedicated reader of Virginia Woolf’s writing, Nunez combines intellectual rigor at the sentence level with an emotional pull all her own, drawing in a large, international readership—her work has been translated into over thirty languages. The writer and critic Lucy Sante has said of Nunez’s critically acclaimed work, “They’re like crime novels. Once you walk into them, you’re not getting out until you reach the end.” In 2024, Pedro Almodóvar adapted What Are You Going Through into the film The Room Next Door with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and The Friend became a movie starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), a Berlin Prize Fellowship (2005), the Rome Prize in Literature (2001), and a Whiting Award (1993), Nunez has taught at Boston University, Columbia, the New School, and Princeton, among other institutions with esteemed literary programs, and now devotes herself to writing.

NONFICTION

Patricia J. Williams (United States)

“I am literally floating—this much pure joy is electric! Honestly, what an amazing gift, to be able to write, and to just write!”

Patricia J. Williams was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A longtime former “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” columnist for The Nation, Williams is also the author of six books of nonfiction. In her most recent work, The Miracle of the Black Leg(2024), Williams leverages her background as a contracts law scholar and her journalist’s sense of curiosity to explore themes of identity, ethics, and race. This genre-exploding tour de force begins with the author’s meditation on a mysterious, centuries-old painting depicting a white man with a Black man’s leg surgically attached—the Black “donor” collapsed in the foreground. “My imagination spun cocoons of explanation, like lullabies” the author writes. “[…] Ultimately, I had to step outside of my own assumptions, expectations, and fictionalizing to finally ask—thus opening myself to the documentation of the painting’s history.” To engage with Williams’s oeuvre is to step outside of the creative/academic binary and encounter pages where creative musings reverberate alongside groundbreaking investigations into archiving as a social process. In the words of the activist and philosopher Angela Davis, Williams’s work contains “stunning analyses of seemingly ordinary stories and the surprising connections between them.” A MacArthur fellow (2000), Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School. She is currently a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University.

Rana Dasgupta (United Kingdom)

“What a beautiful prize this is, overflowing with literary love and ambition. It’s so moving to be embraced by such a spirit, to be invited into such a community. Thank you.”

Born in Canterbury, United Kingdom, Rana Dasgupta has lived in the United States, India, and France. His work includesTokyo Cancelled (2005), a collection of contemporary folktales, and a novel, Solo (2009), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2010). In 2014, he published his first nonfiction work, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, an exhilarating blend of literary reportage and intimate oral history. This portrait of India’s capital, and the dizzying transformation it underwent at the turn of the twenty-first century, won the Ryszard Kapuściński Award (2017) and the Prix Émile Guimet (2017). It features lush descriptions of the daily lives of Delhi’s elite, and an unfiltered view of the precarious existence of the city’s underclass. With a strong sense of the universality of history and storytelling, Dasgupta’s work has become ever more engaged with the grand forces acting on people in our era of globalization. His clear-eyed observation of 21st-century crises lies at the heart of his highly anticipated forthcoming book, After Nations (2025), which explores the dissipation of the powers of the nation-state and seeks ways for us to navigate the resulting confusion. As an essayist, Dasgupta has contributed to distinguished outlets such as Harper’s, Granta, and The New Statesman. For several years, he taught a course on 21st-century culture and ideas at Brown University. His lectures on the nation-state, and the possibilities beyond it, have been hosted by the Berggruen Institute, the Serpentine Gallery, the House of World Cultures, and elsewhere.

DRAMA

Roy Williams (United Kingdom)

“Such an unexpected delight to receive this prize. Truly speechless. I am thrilled as well as honoured.”

One of Britain’s most significant playwrights, Roy Williams is also one of its most prolific. Since The No Boys Cricket Club(1996) premiered at Theatre Stratford East, Williams has gone on to write fifteen plays. Known for his nuanced portrayals of race and class, Williams leverages his exquisite powers of observation to reveal how the simmering pressures of contemporary life can explode into unchecked hatred. In Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads (2002), Williams homes in on a group of working-class Londoners watching an England v. Germany soccer game at a pub. With an exquisite ear for dialogue, Williams’s characters’ conversations have the rhythms of everyday life, yet glint with the power of a talent who has been diligently sharpening his skills. “[Britain] can’t have everyone been a doctor or a lawyer, the economy would fall apart and do you know who we’re going to blame for not getting ahead?” says a white character to a Black one, commenting on the attacks on working-class solidarity from those in power, “You. Why? Because you’re different, because it’s convenient, because it’s easier to blame you than it is to think about what’s really going on.” With his signature style, and across his oeuvre, Williams paints a portrayal of today’s Britain both uncomfortable and undeniably essential. Williams’s many accolades include the Visionary Honours Award (2022), the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award (2011), the Alfred Fagon Award (2010 and 1997), the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2001), and a nomination for the Olivier Awards (2011). In addition to writing for the stage, Williams also writes for film, television, and radio

Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (United Kingdom)

“I am over the moon and currently hurtling through space somewhere near Jupiter… just marveling at all of this; the past, the present, and the crystallizing future. I am eternally grateful to my ancestors and everyone who has helped me get this far. And so appreciative to everyone involved at the Windham-Campbell Prizes for this thoughtful injection into my career.”

Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, one of British theater’s most exciting voices, launched on the scene with their debut play Muscovado (2014). Set on a 19th-century sugar plantation in Barbados, Ibini’s play is both a haunting portrayal of the brutality of slavery, and a nuanced counternarrative of Black love and friendship amidst the violence. A self-described“bionic, queer playwright,” Ibini centers stories from the margins, including from queer and disabled people, and brings them to life with their signature magical realist splendor. Their follow-up play, Little Miss Burden (2019), explores what it takes to rewrite one’s narrative and shares the often funny truths about growing up with a physical impairment. Ibini’s inspiration—everything from their Nigerian heritage to the ’90s anime Sailor Moon—is channeled into a fresh perspective on race and power. Their Olivier Award-winning play Sleepova (2023) is a love letter to Black girls and takes as its setting a sleepover between four friends. These plays highlight Ibini’s incredible range for writing complex, political, and visionary stories. Ibini is the recipient of the Inevitable Foundation x Loreen Arbus Elevate Collective Award (2024), a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2023), and an Alfred Fagon Audience Award (2015), among other honors. They have written across a variety of mediums including children’s books, for the screen, and audio dramas for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, and Audible. Ibini lives in East London.

POETRY

Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago)

“It’s the most wonderful thing to feel connected to people (living and dead) who cared so much for the freedom of creative expression as to found and administer this prize; it gives me courage, and also the means to be more consistently present to my communities. Winning the Windham-Campbell Prize has lifted weights that I didn’t even know were oppressing me internally; it’s beyond anything I looked for in my ordinary writer’s life. First it Knocked me Flat, but Now I’m Bouncing!”

Poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and lives in the UK. One finds a sacred wonder and delight in language in every poem in each of their nine collections and eight chapbooks. In Utter’s (2013) titular poem, beauty is everywhere. The speaker says, “After all this hiding, no surprise / It’s like a thing in translation: / eggshell-shy. A thumb’s worth of glory, / nesting near the coastlines of your palm.” Capildeo’s poems have a sense of roaming curiosity: think of a determined and sensuous leap, rather than an automatic movement to get from A to B. It’s this rare quality that gives readers the sense that they are dancing alongside Capildeo when engaging with their poetry. Selected by The Guardian as among the best in recent poetry, Capildeo’s latest poetry collection, Polkadot Wounds (2024), finds the poet in conversation with beloveds, both living and passed. With an ear for timeless language, it’s no surprise to learn that Capildeo studied Old Norse and translation while earning their DPhil at Oxford University. The recipient of many awards including Forward Prize for Best Collection for Measures of Expatriation (2016) and the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship (2014), Capildeo is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. They are currently a professor and writer-in-residence at the University of York.

Tongo Eisen-Martin (United States) 

“Incredibly, incredibly honored that my poetry was found worthy of this prize and hope that my cultural work can be of some liberatory use in these times of epochal political shift.”

Born, raised, and currently living in San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin was the city’s eighth Poet Laureate (2021-2024). He is the author of three collections of poetry: Blood on the Fog (2021), selected by the New York Times as among the Best Poetry of 2021; Heaven is All Goodbyes (2017); and Someone’s Dead Already (2015). Eisen-Martin fuses political interventions with an idiosyncratic pattern of logic to elucidate how one can find pockets of freedom even within a wider system of oppression. Describing Eisen-Martin’s poetry, famed writer Claudia Rankine says, “This is resistance as sound.” Yet Eisen-Martin’s poems are as personal as they are political. In Heaven is All Goodbyes, for example, Eisen-Martin takes aim at incarceration-in-plain-sight with the following lines: “My dear, if it is not a city, it is a prison. If it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city.” In addition to writing revolutionary poetry, Eisen-Martin is committed to raising political awareness through education. He has taught creative writing in prisons and is the author of We Charge Genocide Again, a series of lessons plans to support students and teachers in grappling with the state-sanctioned killing of Black people. A recipient of several awards including the American Book Award (2018), a California Book Award (2018), and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award (2018), Eisen-Martin earned both his BA and MA from Columbia University.

About the Windham-Campbell Prizes

Established in 2013 with a significant gift from Donald Windham in memory of his partner of 40 years, Sandy Campbell, the Windham-Campbell Prizes are among the richest and most prestigious literary prizes on earth. The community, camaraderie, diversity, and inclusive nature of the Prizes honours the spirit of their lives. 

www.windhamcampbell.org | @WindhamCampbell