Clockwise from top left: Gwendoline Riley, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Lucy Sante, Kei Miller, Karen Solie, Joyelle McSweeney S. Shakthidharan, Christina Anderson
By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox
Yesterday, the Windham-Campbell Prizes announced the recipients of this year’s award. First awarded in 2013, the Prizes highlight literary achievement and are open to writers in any part of the world, who have published or produced at least one work in English. Awards are by nomination only.
“The arts are facing more challenges now than ever before. It is an honor, therefore, to celebrate this year’s recipients and ensure that the world will continue to enjoy their works for many years to come,” said Michael Kelleher, Director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes.
Each recipient receives a life-changing $175,000 to support their work, which was the goal of Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell when they envisioned the award – to provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work “independent of financial concerns.”
Below is the list of the 2026 recipients, their home country, and the selection committee’s statement about their work.
Fiction:
- Gwendoline Riley (United Kingdom) – “Gwendoline Riley’s incisive novels lay bare the cruelties and complicities of intimacy in prose that is at once meticulous and ruthless.”
- Adam Ehrlich Sachs (United States) – “Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s philosophical fiction is a bravura exploration of the history of knowledge in all of its absurdity, strangeness, and difficult beauty.”
Nonfiction:
- Lucy Sante (United States/Belgium) – “Legendary cultural critic, urban historian, and literary reporter, Lucy Sante focuses keen attention on overlooked facets of human experience and expands possibilities for nonfiction.”
- Kei Miller (Jamaica) – “Kei Miller’s lyrical and trenchant essays hold a range of writerly selves and reveal deep and unsettling truths about the limits of language and the raced and gendered body moving through the world.”
Drama:
- Christina Anderson (United States) – “In her deeply moving and beautifully layered plays, Christina Anderson mines intersections of intimate and political histories to breathe new life into the social drama as a form of ethical and metaphysical inquiry.”
- S. Shakthidharan (Australia/Sri Lanka) – “S. Shakthidharan draws from Tamil-Sri Lankan, South Asian, and Australian pasts to forge new meanings and connections among sprawling and complex histories.”
Poetry:
- Joyelle McSweeney (United States) – “Joyelle McSweeney’s wildly imaginative, rageful poems turn decay into sustenance and go on defying death by thriving on rot.”
- Karen Solie (Canada) – “Through precise, profound, and wry plainspeaking verse, Karen Solie locates and interrogates the human apprehension of the world of things.”
Drama Prize winner S. Shakthidharan said of winning the prize, “I am still in shock about this tremendous and utterly surprising news. To be recognised by a global award of this stature is incredibly affirming, and I suspect it will be life changing.”
The Prizes are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The nominees are considered and recipients selected by an anonymous panel of judges.