The Windham-Campbell Prizes have awarded eight extraordinary writers $175,000 each to support their work and allow them to focus on their creative practice independent of financial concerns.
The 2024 recipients are: Deirdre Madden (Ireland) – fiction; Kathryn Scanlan (United States) – fiction; Christina Sharpe (Canada/United States) – nonfiction; Hanif Abdurraqib (United States) – nonfiction; Christopher Chen (United States) – drama; Sonya Kelly (Ireland) – drama; m. nourbeSe philip (Canada/Trinidad and Tobago) – poetry and Jen Hadfield (United Kingdom/Canada) – poetry.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes are a major global prize that recognizes eight writers each year for literary achievement across four categories – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. With annual prize money exceeding US$1.4m – and total prize money awarded over the past decade at over US$18m – they are one of the most significant prizes in the world.
Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, said: “Each year, I feel incredibly honoured to call the eight recipients: to be the messenger delivering the entirely unexpected and life-changing news that they have been awarded $175,000. It is clear – now, more than ever – how challenging working in the creative industries, around the world, can be. A Windham Campbell Prize is intended to offer financial security, and through this freedom, the time and space to write, to think, to create – all without pressure or expectation.”
For fiction, the Prize has recognized Ireland’s multi-award-winning writer Deirdre Madden, whose work across decades – twelve extraordinary novels including Molly Fox’s Birthday – explores the political, economic and personal through understated yet resonant prose, returning again and again to themes of memory, identity, relationships and the role played by the arts in daily life. American novelist Kathryn Scanlan is also rewarded for her ever-evolving rich, sharp, and absurdist works, such as Kick the Latch, that defy traditional genre categorization.
In nonfiction, American academic Christina Sharpe is celebrated for her work – such as Ordinary Notes, a New Yorker and New York Times Book of the Year – exploring the complex relationship between language and black being, in which Sharpe fuses archival work, cultural criticism, memoir, and photography. Fellow American – a native of Columbus, Ohio – Hanif Abdurraqib is also presented a Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, in recognition of his beautiful, vital and moving body of highly acclaimed literary criticism, including the Carnegie Medal winning A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance.
For drama, San Francisco-born playwright Christopher Chen is honored for his portfolio of formally innovative and politically provocative plays – including the Obie Award for Playwriting-winning Caught – which continuously implicate audiences in questions about art, history, identity, and experience. One of the most exciting voices on the international theatrical scene over the past decade, Ireland’s Sonya Kelly, has been rewarded for her skill and elegance as a storyteller, crafting universal, dramatic experiences – as seen in her plays such as Once Upon a Bridge and The Last Return – that are simultaneously funny, farcical, thrilling, satirical and deeply serious.
In poetry, Trinidad and Tobago’s internationally renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist, m. nourbeSe philip, has been selected for her diverse and rich body of work – including Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng – that is deeply engaged with the complexities of art, colonialism, identity, race, and forgotten and suppressed histories, and that constantly pushes boundaries on the page and in performance. The United Kingdom and Canada’s Jen Hadfield – poet, bookmaker and visual artist – is also recognized for her exceptional poetry collections such as the T.S. Eliot award-winning Nigh-No-Place. Hadfield’s work is characterized by a deep immersion in the matters of language and place, the use of Shetlandic and Scots dialect, and a profound focus on ecological matters including an intense grief at the damage that humanity has done to the environment.
Previous recipients include 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.
