Podcast

Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, essayist, and novelist, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and winner of the prestigious Forward poetry prize for his collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. His most recent book is the essay collection Things I Have Withheld, out in 2021. His story collection Fear of Stones was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and his most recent novel, Augustown was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature and in 2018 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter and, in 2019, he was the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa.

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Gwendoline Riley was born in London. She is the author of seven novels, including First Love, My Phantoms, and most recently, The Palm House.   In 2018, the Times Literary Supplement named her one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today. She won the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a production of Literary Hub

Hosted by Michael Kelleher

Theme music by Dani Lencioni

Produced and edited by Drew Broussard

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Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry (2022) among other honors, McSweeney is also co-founder and co-editor of Action Books. She is currently Chair of the English Department and the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

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Christina Anderson is a playwright, tv writer, screenwriter, and educator. Her work has been produced across the country including theaters such as Berkeley Rep, Goodman Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, and Yale Rep. A Tony nominated writer for Outstanding Book of a Broadway musical, Anderson has received the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, the Horton Foote Prize, the United States Artists Fellowship, MacDowell Fellowship, Lily Awards Harper Lee Prize, Herb Alpert nomination, Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play, and New Dramatist residency. She’s taught playwriting at Rutgers University, SUNY Purchase, Wesleyan University, Yale School of Drama, and served as the interim Head of Playwriting at Brown University. An avid photographer for nearly ten years, the Magnum award review described Christina's work as "compelling" and "poignant." Since 2019, she has produced hip hop instrumentals under the moniker Purely Magenta.

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The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a production of Literary Hub

Hosted by Michael Kelleher

Theme music by Dani Lencioni

Produced and edited by Drew Broussard

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a production of Literary Hub

Hosted by Michael Kelleher

Theme music by Dani Lencioni

Produced and edited by Drew Broussard

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Marina Carr was born in 1964 and grew up in County Offaly. She graduated from UCD in 1987. Her plays include Low in the Dark, This Love Thing, Ullaloo, The Mai (Best New Play, Dublin Theatre Festival), Portia Coughlan (Susan Smith Blackburn Award), By The Bog of Cats (Irish Times/ ESB Award for Best New Play), On Raftery’s Hill,  Woman and Scarecrow, a version of Hecuba, and Gilgamesh. She has been Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College, the Abbey Theatre, Princeton University and was the first John McGahern Writer-in-Residence in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra/DCU. Marina Carr is a member of Aosdána and lives with her family in Dublin.

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Michael R. Jackson is the writer and composer of the Pulitzer and Tony-winning A Strange Loop as well as White Girl in Danger. Most recently, he wrote the libretto for Consequences in Sue (which just premiered in Philadelphia). He also wrote lyrics and co-wrote the book for the musical adaptation of the 2007 horror film Teeth with composer and co-bookwriter Anna K. Jacobs. He holds a BFA and MFA in playwriting and Musical Theatre Writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He has received a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a Dramatist Guild fellowship, and was the 2017 Williamstown Theatre Festival Playwright-In-Residence.

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Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (with Peter Cole), Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, and Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures. Hoffman’s essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the TLS, Raritan, Bookforum, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC. She is formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post and was one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of the literature of the Levant. She has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, and NYU, as well as the Franke Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. She lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.

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Geoff Dyer is the author, most recently, of Homework: A Memoir as well as four novels and many other non-fiction works. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ’s Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

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Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three collections of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and eight novels, including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year and won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which won the Irish Novel of the year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Her work has been nominated for the Women’s Prize five times. From 2015 to 2018 she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest, The Wren, The Wren is the winner of the 2024 Writer's Prize for Fiction.

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Born in Canterbury, United Kingdom, Rana Dasgupta has lived in the United States, India, and France. His work includes Tokyo 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. His clear-eyed observation of 21st-century crises lies at the heart of his highly anticipated forthcoming book, After Nations (2026), 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.

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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. 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.

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Roy Williams has written fifteen plays since The No Boys Cricket Club premiered at Theatre Stratford East in 1996. 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.

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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 including most recently The Miracle of the Black Leg. 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.

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Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini is the author of Muscovado, Little Miss Burden, and the Olivier-award-winning Sleepova. 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.

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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. 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.

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Tongo Eisen-Martin was San Francisco’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). 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.

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Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays, and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, and her diaries Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story. Her latest book is The Season.

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READING LIST:

Seeing by José Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costa • Blindness by José Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costa • Saramago's Nobel Lecture

Dionne Brand is the award-winning author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her twelve books of poetry include Land to Light On; thirsty; Inventory; Ossuaries; The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos; and Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Her six works of fiction include At the Full and Change of the Moon; What We All Long For; Love Enough; and Theory. Her nonfiction work includes Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Brand is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, among them the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Toronto Book Award, the Trillium Book Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize, and the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She is the Editorial Director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, and University Professor Emerita at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a co-production between The Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Hub. Music by Dani Lencioni, production by Drew Broussard, hosted by Michael Kelleher.

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READING LIST:

Villette by Charlotte Brontë • Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy • The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Olivia Laing is the author of several books of nonfiction and fiction including The Garden Against Time and the forthcoming The Silver Book. The Lonely City (2016) was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and has been translated into 14 languages. The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) was a finalist for both the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn PrizeLaing lives in Cambridge, England, and writes on art and culture for many publications, including The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The New York Times. Her debut novel Crudo was published by Picador and W. W. Norton & Company in June 2018.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a co-production between The Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Hub. Music by Dani Lencioni, production by Drew Broussard, hosted by Michael Kelleher.

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Reading list: 

There Is No Blue by Martha Baillie • The Search for Heinrich Schlögel by Martha Baillie • Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison • Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

For a full episode transcript, click here.

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Pastoral (nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, and Lambton, Kent and Other Vistas: A Play. His new book, Other Worlds: Stories, is out from FSG in May.

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Reading list:

Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell • "Joe Gould's Teeth" by Jill Lepore • Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney • Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell

Kathryn Scanlan is the author of two novels (Aug 9—Fog and Kick the Latch) and one collection of short stories (The Dominant Animal). She won a 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and her work has appeared in Egress, Granta, and NOON, among other places, and her short story “The Old Mill” was selected by Michael Cunningham for the 2010 Iowa Review Fiction Prize. A graduate of the University of Iowa and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she currently lives in Los Angeles.

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Reading list:

Born to Slow Horses by Kamau Brathwaite • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys • The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon • The Tempest by William Shakespeare

m. nourbeSe philip is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. Across her diverse and rich body of work, philip has constantly and deeply engaged with the complexities of art, colonialism, identity, and race, with a particular interest in forgotten and suppressed histories. Born in Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago in 1947, she is the recipient of many honors, including the Molson Prize (2021), the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature (2020), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), philip was educated at the University of the West Indies and earned graduate degrees in law and political science from the University of Western Ontario. Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies, including the Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English (2000) and International Feminist Fiction (1992), among others. She lives in Toronto.

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Reading list:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, tr. by Jeremy Leggatt • The Hours by Michael Cunningham • Once Upon a Bridge by Sonya Kelly

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Sonya Kelly is the author of five full-length plays, as well as numerous scripts for film, radio, and television. Once Upon a Bridge (2021) was a finalist for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Best New Play Award and Kelly’s work has been recognized with two Scotsman Fringe First Awards (2022, 2012) as well as the Stewart Parker Award (2018), a Writers' Guild of Ireland Award (2019) and the Dublin Fringe Award for Best Production (2014). A graduate of Trinity College, she lives in Dublin with her wife and daughter. Sonya is a member of The Dean Arts Studios, an organization dedicated to supporting artists from all over the world by providing rent-free space.

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Reading list:

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard • Walden by Henry David Thoreau • Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield • "An Transparent Eyeball" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Jen Hadfield is a poet, bookmaker, and visual artist. She is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently The Stone Age. Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place (2008) received the T. S. Eliot Prize. Hadfield earned her BA from the University of Edinburgh and MLitt in creative writing from the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow. Her awards and honors include a Highland Books Prize (2022), an Edwin Morgan International Poetry Award (2012), the Dewar Award (2007) and an Eric Gregory Award (2003), as well as residencies with the Shetland Arts Trust and the Scottish Poetry Library. In 2014, she was named by the Poetry Book Society as one of twenty poets selected to represent the Next Generation of poets in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Hadfield currently lives in the Shetland Islands, where she is Reader in Residence at Shetland Library.

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Reading list: 

Counternarratives by John Keene • Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain • James by Percival Everett • Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison • The Awakening by Kate Chopin

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Christina Sharpe is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada, as well as the author of three books of nonfiction: Ordinary Notes (2023), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010). Sharpe’s writing has also appeared in many artist catalogues and journals. Ordinary Notes was a Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. The winner of the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Sharpe lives in Toronto.

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Reading list: 

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges • Italo Calvino • Rosicrucianism • Caught by Christopher Chen • Borges, Between History and Eternity by Hernán Díaz

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Christopher Chen is the author of more than a dozen formally innovative and politically provocative plays, including, most recently, The Headlands (2020) and Passage (2019). The recipient of a United States Artists USA Fellowship (2021), a Steinberg Playwright Award (2020), and an Obie Award for Playwriting (2017), among many other honors, Chen holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University. He lives in California.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Reading list: 

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville • Carl Jung • William Shakespeare • Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Deirdre Madden is a writer from Toomebridge, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The author of eight acclaimed novels, she has twice been a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2009, 1996) and has received numerous other awards and honors, including the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame (2014), the Somerset Maugham Award (1989), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (1980). Madden holds a BA from Trinity College, Dublin and an MA from the University of East Anglia. She has been a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, since 1997, and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Reading list: 

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor • Mama Day by Gloria Naylor • Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor • Your Blues Ain't Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell • The Easy Rawlins novels by Walter Mosley • Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of three critically acclaimed books of nonfiction and five poetry collections. A writer of extraordinary depth, style, and range, Abdurraqib is a public intellectual in the truest sense of the term, combining discursive flexibility with a profound emotional and intellectual rigor. In both his essays and in books like A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (2021), Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (2019), and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), Abdurraqib moves through a wide range of subjects—Michael Jackson and moon walks, Sun Ra and NASA missions—incorporating the personal and the political with both joy and seeming effortlessness. He is the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction (2022), the Gordon Burn Prize (2021), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2021) among other honors. Abdurraqib is also the host of a weekly podcast called “Object of Sound” with Sonos Radio.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Reading list: 

First Love by Ivan Turgenev, tr. by Isaiah Berlin • The Odyssey by Homer • "A Nest of Gentlefolk" by Ivan Turgenev • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Tessa Hadley is the author of three previous collections of stories and eight novels. She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and has been a finalist for the Story Prize. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She lives in Cardiff, Wales.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Reading list: 

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, tr. by Laura Vergnaud • Blackouts by Justin Torres • Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem • Roberto Bolaño • Clarice Lispector

John Keene is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His latest book, Punks: New and Selected Poems, won the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene is the recipient of many awards and fellowships—including the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Whiting Foundation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the American Book Award. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

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Reading list: 

Far Away by Caryl Churchill • Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill • Top Girls by Caryl Churchill • Prince • Jasmine Lee Jones on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun • Cristina and Her Double: Essays by Herta Müller

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright whose plays include Girls, Everybody (Pulitzer Prize finalist), War, Gloria (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Appropriate (OBIE Award), An Octoroon (OBIE Award), and Neighbors. A Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre, recent honors include the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright from the London Evening Standard, a London Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwriting, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Steinberg Playwriting Award, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. Jacobs-Jenkins has taught at Yale, NYU, Juilliard, Hunter College, and the University of Texas-Austin.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Reading list: 

Mouchette by Georges Bernanos, tr. by J.C. Whitehouse • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy • Tolstoy Together • Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday's Child, The Book of Goose, Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life as well as the book Tolstoy Together. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Reading list: 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison • Moby Dick by Herman Melville • "Box Seat" by Jean Toomer • If He Hollers, Let Him Go by Chester Himes • Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes • Native Son by Richard Wright • "(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue" by Louis Armstrong • The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler • Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Percival Everett’s most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award) The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has a poetry collection forthcoming with Red Hen Press. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Reading List:

• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
• August Wilson's Century Cycle
• Get Out by Jordan Peele
• Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson
• "A Love Supreme" by John Coltrane
• Beneatha's Place by Kwame Kwei-Armah

Jasmine Lee-Jones is a writer and performer. Jasmine was a writer-on-attachment for the 2016 Open Court Festival, and was further developed as a writer through the Royal Court’s Young Court programme. Her first play seven methods of killing kylie jenner (2019) was first commissioned as part of The Andrea Project and opened at the Royal Court in July 2019. In 2023, she became the youngest ever recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize.

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Reading List:

• White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
• The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin
• "Do They Know It's Christmas?" -- BandAid 1984

for a full episode transcript, click here.

Dr Susan Williams is a senior research fellow in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her pathbreaking books include White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa; Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, which in 2015 triggered a new, ongoing UN investigation into the death of the UN Secretary-General; Spies in the Congo, which spotlights the link between US espionage in the Congo and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945; Colour Bar, the story of Botswana’s founding president, which was made into the major 2016 film A United Kingdom; and The People’s King, which presents an original perspective on the abdication of Edward VIII and his marriage to Wallis Simpson.

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Reading List:

• "Eyes of a Blue Dog" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo
• S.J.Res.14
• Blood Snow by dg nanouk okpik

For a full episode transcript, click here.

dg nanouk okpik is an Iñupiaq-Inuit poet from south-central Alaska. Her debut collection of poetry, Corpse Whale (2012), received the American Book Award (2013) and her 2022 collection Blow Snow was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been published in several anthologies, including New Poets of Native Nations (2018) and the forthcoming Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (2023). The recipient of the May Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2022), okpik lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is a Lannan Foundation Fellow at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

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Reading List:

• Idlewild, Michigan
• for colored girls... by Ntozake Shange
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Family Guy (1999-present)
• Flyin' West and Other Plays by Pearl Cleage

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Dominique Morisseau has established herself as not only one of America’s preeminent dramatists but as a visionary force in the field of theater across the globe. Her body of work, including the hugely ambitious and critically acclaimed three-play cycle The Detroit Project (Skeleton Crew [2016], Paradise Blue [2015], and Detroit ’67 [2013]), is both deeply poetic and sharply philosophical, drawing upon the rich histories of Black American literature, music, and activism to create unflinching—and wildly entertaining—dramatic experiences. In the Detroit Project plays, as well as in standalone works like Confederates (2022), Pipeline (2017), and Blood at the Root (2014), Morisseau dramatizes the entanglement of art and politics with care, sophistication, and a fervent conviction. Morisseau also has made an impact as a leader in her artistic communities. Countless young writers name Morisseau as a key influence, and her perspectives on community-building, inclusion, and transparency have changed the culture of theater-making for the better. Her many accolades include, most recently, a Drama Desk Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2018), two Obie Awards (2018, 2016), and a Steinberg Playwright Award (2015). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

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READING LIST:

• Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
• Times Like These by Rachel Ingalls
• The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
• Grumpy Old Men (1993)

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas. She wrote the novel Severance and the story collection Bliss Montage, both published by FSG. Her work has received the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, an NEA fellowship, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Both titles have been named to the NY Times Notable Books of the Year and her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and more. She has taught creative writing and English at Cornell University and the University of Chicago, where she currently serves as an assistant professor of practice. She lives in Chicago with her family.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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READING LIST:

• The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde
• Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• Broadside Press
• "A Supermarket in California!" by Allen Ginsberg

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Born in Summit, New Jersey in 1982, Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an activist, critic, poet, scholar, and educator. A self-described “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist,” Gumbs uses hybrid forms to re-envision old narratives and engage with the history of Black intellectual-imaginative work. Her four books of prose-poetry include Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), Undrowned (2020), M Archive (2018), and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016). Dub, M Archive, and Spill form a kind of triptych, each engaging with the work of a Black woman theorist: Sylvia Wynter in Dub; M. Jacqui Alexander in M Archive; and Hortense Spillers in Spill. In all her work, Gumbs raises the stakes of literature within and beyond the page. She is a people’s poet, awake to the form’s capacity to imagine alternative worlds, across and through time. Her worldview is capacious and paradigm-shifting, speaking to urgent realities with exuberant love, and inviting activists, artists, and readers alike to join in her participatory presentations. A graduate of Barnard College and Duke University, Gumbs is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2022), a Whiting Award (2022), and a National Humanities Center Fellowship (2020). She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is currently at work on a biography of Audre Lorde.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

READING LIST:

• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• Derry Girls (2018-2022)
• The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino
• The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
• An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec
• Frank Lloyd Wright's Plan for Greater Baghdad
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Darran Anderson is an Irish essayist, journalist, and memoirist. Over the past decade, he has written on the intersections of culture, politics, urbanism, and technology for a wide variety of publications, including The Atlantic, frieze magazine, TheGuardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book was Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between (2015) and his second, Inventory (2020), was a finalist for the PEN Ackerley Award. Born in Derry, he now lives in London.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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