Windham-Campbell Prizes

Meet the 2026 Recipients!

Recipients 2026

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  • Karen  Solie

    Canada
    Poetry

    It's taking awhile for this news to sink in! I am deeply grateful for this life–changing honor.

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  • Joyelle  McSweeney

    United States
    Poetry

    Sitting at my kitchen table among piles of Legos, stickers, half-made Valentines, and sticky books of Surrealist women's poetry in translation, I find myself suddenly electrified, as if the Universe had lowered her star-cloak and looked me dead in the eye. I now wear an eel for a stole, an eel I stole from Heaven. I feel transformed, elated, and charged with a very large charge.

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  • Gwendoline  Riley

    United Kingdom
    Fiction

    This is very hard for me to take in! I am more grateful than I can say; this unimagined vote of confidence will not go wasted on me.

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  • Lucy  Sante

    United States / Belgium
    Nonfiction

    Who—me? [looks over both shoulders] Well golly!

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  • Christina  Anderson

    United States
    Drama

    Absolutely thrilled! The synchronicity of this moment is humbling yet powerfully encouraging. Grateful. Elated. Honored. To find out my work resonates to this degree, speaks for me in these rooms—totally surprising.  

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  • Kei  Miller

    Jamaica
    Nonfiction

    I'm a little embarrassed to admit—I have secretly envied Windham-Campbell winners in the past. Honestly, winning it now, I feel both thrilled, and a little repentant.

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  • Adam Ehrlich  Sachs

    United States
    Fiction

    An hour before I got the news-no joke-I'd been googling the rules for when the IRS (and hence my ego) might reclassify my writing 'business' as a 'hobby.' I can't say how grateful I am for this astounding psycho-financial boost.

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  • S.  Shakthidharan

    Australia / Sri Lanka
    Drama

    I am still in shock about this tremendous and utterly surprising news. To be recognized by a global award of this stature is incredibly affirming, and I suspect it will be life changing.

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News

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  1. The 2026 Windham-Campbell Festival is now online!

    Posted

    If you missed the Windham-Campbell Prizes Festival, or want to rewatch your favorite events, the recordings are now online!

  2. Explore the 2025 Festival Calendar

    Posted

    Check out the full schedule now! The fall festival showcases the extraordinary range of talent across the Windham-Campbell Prizes with a series of thought-provoking lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, and performances from this year’s recipients and alumni. The festival will also feature the annual closing event, which sees all 2025 recipients deliver a short reading on the final evening. Morning Wake Up sessions offer attendees free coffee and treats, book giveaways, and a short readings by prize recipients, hosted by The Yale Review.

  3. Couldn't attend our 2024 festival in person?

    Posted

    Recordings of a wide range of events from the festival are now available on our YouTube channel. Start with the keynote lecture by internationally renowned writer and translator Lydia Davis and then go wherever your fancy takes you! Maybe a museum session? Or a staged reading? A genre-bending discussion about the history of Black performance, perhaps?

  4. The new summer series of our podcast is here!

    Posted

    A new season of the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast, produced in partnership with Literary Hub, launches on May 29! Each of the eight episodes features one of this year’s recipients: for Fiction, Deirdre Madden and Kathryn Scanlan; for Nonfiction, Christina Sharpe and Hanif Abdurraqib; for Drama, Christopher Chen and Sonya Kelly; and for Poetry, m. nourbeSe philip and Jen Hadfield.

  5. The new winter series of our podcast is here!

    Posted

    Part of our ongoing partnership with literary website Lit Hub, the new episodes feature Windham-Campbell Prize alumni: Yiyun Li, Creative Writing Professor at Princeton University (Fiction, 2020); John Keene, award-winning novelist of Counternarratives and Rutgers University-Newark chair of African Studies (Fiction, 2018); Tessa Hadley, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature with a reputation as one of England’s finest contemporary writers (Fiction 2016); and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins whose Obie Award-winning play Appropriate is currently making its debut on Broadway (Drama, 2016).

About

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The Windham-Campbell Prizes call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.
  1. 1

    120
    Nominees

    Nominators

    Nominators are invited based on recognized expertise in the literary field. Nominators do not judge, and judges do not nominate.

    Nominations

    Nominations are by invitation only. There is no application process. Nominees are unaware they have been nominated unless they receive the prize.

  2. 2

    16
    Finalists

    Prize Juries

    Three-person prize juries in each category read the work of the nominees, including selected works and a dossier prepared on each writer.

    Selections

    Each jury reads throughout the summer and convenes in the fall to select four finalists to send to the selection committee.

  3. 3

    8
    Recipients

    Selection Committee

    Recipients are selected by a nine-person committee including two lifetime members, two Yale faculty, and five from outside Yale, including the chair.

    Selections and Notification

    The committee meets in February to select two recipients per category. Recipients are notified immediately, but are not announced for the 6-8 weeks needed to prepare publicity.
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