$1.4 million Given Out in Windham-Campbell Annual Prize To 8 Writers

Today, 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 2025 recipients are:

- Sigrid Nunez (United States) – fiction

- Anne Enright (Ireland) – fiction

- Patricia J. Williams (United States) – nonfiction

- Rana Dasgupta (United Kingdom) – nonfiction

- Roy Williams (United Kingdom) – drama

- Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (United Kingdom) – drama

- Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago) – poetry

- Tongo Eisen-Martin (United States) – 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 $1.4m USD – and total prize money awarded over the past decade at over $19m USD – they are one of the most significant prizes in the world.

Michael Kelleher, Director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, said: “Each year, eight writers receive an unexpected call sharing the life-changing news that they have been awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize, offering $175,000 and with it the opportunity to create their work independent of financial concerns. It was the late Donald Windham’s wish in establishing these prizes to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with time, space and freedom. This mission remains at the heart of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, and in today’s world it is more vital than ever to recognize and support the crucial work and wisdom that writers share with us all.”

For Fiction, New York City’s multi-award-winning novelist and originator of auto-fiction, Sigrid Nunez, is celebrated for her ground-breaking work – including the National Book Award-winning The Friend, which has just been released as a movie starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray – that reaches beyond the confines of traditional plot and character development, to collage autobiography and imagination into universal portraits of the human experience. Hailed as a master of her form, the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, Anne Enright, is also recognized for her formidable collection of novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Gathering, through which she explores the theme of the family through startlingly potent and elegant domestic portraits, and deceptively simple language.

The Windham-Campbell Prize 2025 selection committee – which remains anonymous – has given the following citations for Sigrid Nunez and Anne Enright:

“With each careful, concise novel, Sigrid Nunez scrupulously dissects the ethical complications of authorship, while still enacting—soulfully, quietly, paradoxically—the visceral and emotional force of character and story”

“In her wide-ranging and wryly unsentimental fiction, Anne Enright explores the limitations and joys of our human need for belonging.”

In Nonfiction, renowned American legal scholar Patricia J. Williams is honored for her extensive and pivotal body of work that masterfully reveals and addresses some of American’s most complex societal problems – including The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law, a collection of essays that examine the intersection of bioethics, critical race theory, the US Supreme Court and more. British essayist Rana Dasgupta is also awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction in recognition of his perceptive critique of global hypercapitalism, industrialization, politics and class, as seen in his Orwell Prize and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize shortlisted book Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi.

The Windham-Campbell Prize 2025 selection committee – which remains anonymous – has given the following citations for Patricia J. Williams and Rana Dasgupta:

“In incisive works of moral philosophy and cultural critique, Patricia J. Williams draws together history, memoir, and legal scholarship to reckon with urgent issues of our time.”

“Rana Dasgupta captures contemporary capitalism’s visions and challenges with unflinching candor, and through delicately layered perspectives, allows his subjects to reveal themselves in a world of dissonances.”

For Drama, one of Britain’s most significant and prolific playwrights, Roy Williams, has been rewarded for his undeniably essential oeuvre, through which he leverages an exquisite power of observation to create nuanced portrayals of race and class, today’s Britain, and how the simmering pressures of contemporary life can explode into unchecked hatred. The second recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize of Drama is another of British theater’s most exciting voices: Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini. After launching onto the scene with their debut play Muscovado, this self-described “bionic, queer playwright,” centers stories from the margins, including from queer and disabled people, and brings them to life with their signature magical realist splendor.

The Windham-Campbell Prize 2025 selection committee – which remains anonymous – has given the following citations for Roy Williams and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini:

“Roy Williams’s nuanced, multivocal portrayals of race and class lay bare uncomfortable truths about British identity, creating an essential and complex theater of contemporary life.”

“Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini's exuberant plays barrel onto the stage with joyful abandon, loosening the knots in the fabric of our socio-political lives with forensic attention to reveal new, hopeful ways of remaking the world”

In Poetry, the internationally prolific Trinidadian Scottish poet Anthony V. Capildeo is recognized for their complex and precise writing – including the Forward Prize-winning Utter and T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Measures of Expatriation – that deeply engages and captures the nuances of belonging, identity and gender. The United States’ Tongo Eisen-Martin – the eighth Poet Laureate of San Francisco and educator – has been selected for his revolutionary and politically astute poetry, such as the American Book Award-winning and Griffin Poetry Prize-nominated Heaven Is All Goodbyes. Eisen-Martin’s poems confront the oppression and injustices of American society whilst calling the tenacious energy of the human spirit to action, all through a surrealist lens.

The Windham-Campbell Prize 2025 selection committee – which remains anonymous – has given the following citations for Anthony V. Capildeo and Tongo Eisen-Martin:

“Anthony V. Capildeo’s poems are immersed equally in narrative and lyric, querying forms with an insistent playfulness and a radical political consciousness.”

“With unambiguous purpose and a distinctive voice, Tongo Eisen-Martin puts injustice, love, and intergenerational memory to work in verse that is both surreal and revolutionary.”

Previous US writers that have been awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize include Hanif Abdurraqib (Nonfiction, 2024), Percival Everett (Fiction, 2023), Ling Ma (Fiction, 2023), Dominique Morisseau (Drama, 2023), Margo Jefferson (Nonfiction, 2022), Vivian Gornick (Nonfiction, 2021), Michael R. Jackson (Drama, 2021), Anne Boyer (Nonfiction, 2020), Cathy Park Hong (Poetry, 2018), C. E. Morgan (Fiction, 2016), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Drama, 2016), and Jeremy Scahill (Nonfiction, 2013).

Further international recipients include Christina Sharpe (Nonfiction, Canada, 2024), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Fiction, Zimbabwe, 2022), Bhanu Kapil (Poetry, United Kingdom, 2020), Lorna Goodison (Poetry, Jamaica/Canada, 2018), Marina Carr (Drama, Ireland, 2017), Helen Garner (Nonfiction, Australia, 2016), Edmund de Waal (Nonfiction, United Kingdom, 2015), Helon Habila (Fiction, Nigeria, 2015), and Pankaj Mishra (Fiction, India, 2014).

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.