Windham-Campbell Prizes
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Lucy Sante
United States / BelgiumNonfiction
Read MoreWho—me? [looks over both shoulders] Well golly!
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Karen Solie
CanadaPoetry
Read MoreIt's taking awhile for this news to sink in! I am deeply grateful for this life–changing honor.
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Christina Anderson
United StatesDrama
Read MoreAbsolutely 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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Gwendoline Riley
United KingdomFiction
Read MoreThis 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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S. Shakthidharan
Australia / Sri LankaDrama
Read MoreI 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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Kei Miller
JamaicaNonfiction
Read MoreI'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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Joyelle McSweeney
United StatesPoetry
Read MoreSitting 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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Adam Ehrlich Sachs
United StatesFiction
Read MoreAn 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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Explore the 2025 Festival Calendar
PostedCheck 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.
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Couldn't attend our 2024 festival in person?
PostedRecordings 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?
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The new summer series of our podcast is here!
PostedA 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.
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The new winter series of our podcast is here!
PostedPart 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).
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Festival Schedule is Live!
PostedCheck 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, workshops, and performances from this year’s recipients. The festival also features a keynote lecture by internationally renowned writer and translator Lydia Davis and the return of our annual kick-off event: a welcome party with free food and music at our College Street Tent.
Festival
Save the Date!
September 15-18th on Yale’s Campus
Calendar Live in August
and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.
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NomineesNominators
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.
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FinalistsPrize 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.
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RecipientsSelection 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.