Yale University revealed the eight winners of this year’s $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prizes, which “celebrate achievement across fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama.”
This year’s nonfiction winners are Hanif Abdurraqib, whose books include A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance and the recently published There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, as well as Christina Sharpe, whose Ordinary Notes was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The fiction writers to win the prizes are Deirdre Madden, whose novels include Authenticity and Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Kathryn Scanlan, author of Aug 9—Fog and The Dominant Animal.
Taking home the poetry awards were m. nourbeSe philip (Salmon Courage, Discourse on the Logic of Language) and Jen Hadfield (Almanacs, The Stone Age), while the drama prizes went to Christopher Chen (Into the Numbers, The Headlands) and Sonya Kelly (The Wheelchair on My Face, The Last Return).
Michael Kelleher, the director of the prizes, said in a statement, “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.”
The Windham-Campbell Prizes were established in 2013. Previous winners have included Cathy Park Hong, Ling Ma, Percival Everett, and Tsitsi Dangarembga.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
