Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes

Recipients

2013

• Jonny Steinberg – "Using a novelistic style that gives everyday people heroic complexity and scale, Jonny Steinberg allows us to encounter lives that enlarge our empathy and sharpen our understanding of the human condition."
• Jeremy Scahill – "Jeremy Scahill’s investigative reporting is in the best tradition of speaking truth to power, waging a political campaign by journalistic means, indefatigable in its detail and international in outlook."
• Adina Hoffman – "In a land where even the most cautious nonfiction can draw howls of protest, Adina Hoffman combines fastidious listening, even-handed research, and prose so engaged that it makes the long-vanished visible again."

• Naomi Wallace – "Naomi Wallace mines historical situations in plays that are muscular, devastating, and unwavering."
• Tarell Alvin McCraney – "Tarell Alvin McCraney’s working class characters inhabit an extraordinary mythic universe, speaking a poetic language through which we grasp the spiritual stature of embattled people."
• Stephen Adly Guirgis – "Stephen Adly Guirgis writes dramatic dialogue with passion and humor, creating characters who live on the edge, and whose linguistic bravado reinvigorates the American vernacular."

• Zoë Wicomb – "Zoë Wicomb’s subtle, lively language and beautifully crafted narratives explore the complex entanglements of home, and the continuing challenges of being in the world."
• James Salter – "Sentence by sentence, James Salter’s elegantly natural prose has a precision and clarity which make ordinary words swing wide open."
• Tom McCarthy – "Tom McCarthy constructs strange worlds where we find reflective echoes of our own and meditations on the meaning and making of art."

  2014

• John Vaillant – "John Vaillant writes gripping narratives that combine science, geography, history and anthropology to convey his passionate commitment to preserving natural resources in an environmentally threatened world."
• Pankaj Mishra – "Pursuing high standards of literary style, Pankaj Mishra gives us new narratives about the evolution of modern Asia. He charts the journey from the Indian small town to the metropolis and rebuffs imperialist clichés with equal verve."

• Kia Corthron – "Through her command of dramatic spectacle, Kia Corthron places often unheard and marginalized characters within a historical and political context that gives their lives an urgent and poetic resonance."
• Sam Holcroft – "Sam Holcroft’s plays explore the routinized and expressive registers of language, gesture, and role-playing, walking the uncomfortably thin line between spectatorship and complicity."
• Noëlle Janaczewska – "Noëlle Janaczewska brings innovative stagecraft and a questioning voice to plays that translate cultural and political tensions into drama as complex as it is illuminating."

• Aminatta Forna – "Aminatta Forna writes through and beyond personal experience to speak to the wider world in subtly constructed narratives that reveal the ongoing aftershocks of living through violence and war."
• Jim Crace – "Jim Crace's ever-varied novels return us to the body, to ceremony and to community in a disenchanted world, transforming the indifferent and the repugnant alike into things of beauty."
• Nadeem Aslam – "Nadeem Aslam’s deftly crafted novels explore historical and political trauma with lyricism and profound compassion."

  2015

• Edmund de Waal – "Edmund de Waal’s sure narrative instinct and lyrical imagination inform a deeply felt examination of the hold that objects have on our personal and collective memory."
• Geoff Dyer – "Omnivorously curious and psychologically probing, Geoff Dyer’s writings reinvent again and again the possibilities of nonfiction, discovering as many new subjects as he does ways of writing about them."
• John Jeremiah Sullivan – "John Jeremiah Sullivan’s wide-ranging, exuberant essays engage the full spectrum of American life with passion, precision, and wit."

• Jackie Sibblies Drury – "Jackie Sibblies Drury deftly blends historical inquiry and meta-theatrical experiment to challenge assumptions about race, performance, and individual responsibility."
• Helen Edmundson – "Helen Edmundson’s ambitious plays distill historical complexities through characters whose passions and ethical dilemmas mirror and illuminate a larger political landscape"
• Debbie Tucker Green – "Pushing speech and silence to the limit, Debbie Tucker Green’s plays expose the brutal choices of individuals bound by the imperatives of family, society, and love."

• Teju Cole – "Teju Cole’s peripatetic narrators, like his prose, revel in the possibilities and limitations of global urbanity, navigating the fine line between choice and circumstance, perception and memory."
• Helon Habila – "Helon Habila is that rare combination of storyteller and stylist who challenges expectations while deepening our empathy for ordinary people confronting extraordinary times."
• Ivan Vladislavic – "Ivan Vladislavić’s fiction explores the uncomfortable aftermath of apartheid through inventive meditations on the complex intersection of history, politics, and art."

  2016

• Hilton Als – White Girls and The Women
• Stanley Crouch – Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome? and Ain’t No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight
• Helen Garner – This House of Grief

• Branden Jacobs-Jenkins – An Octoroon and War
• Hannah Moscovitch – East of Berlin and This is War
• Abbie Spallen – Lally the Scut and Pumpgirl

• Tessa Hadley – Clever Girl and The Past
• C. E. Morgan – All the Living and The Sport of Kings
• Jerry Pinto – Em and the Big Hoom

  2017

• Maya Jasanoff
• Ashleigh Young

• Marina Carr
• Ike Holter

• Ali Cobby Eckermann
• Carolyn Forché

• André Alexis
• Erna Brodber

  2018

• Sarah Bakewell — for work that "unknots complex philosophical thought with verve and wit; her eye for detail and her animated conversation bring readers to inhabit the lives of great philosophers." Works include How to Live: A Life of Montaigne and At the Existentialist Café.
• Olivia Laing — for being "a cartographer of human emotion, mixing memoir, biography and critical engagement with an acute sense of place; through the arts, she searches the depths of the self." Works include To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, and The Lonely City.

• Lucas Hnath — for "agile writing which ranges across genres and subjects with voracious curiosity; his wit, formal daring and poetic precision crystallize dramas that are socially incisive and indelible." Works include The Christians and A Doll's House, Part 2.
• Suzan-Lori Parks — for being "an artist whose ethical imagination confronts rather than consoles; she acknowledges in the fissures of language and human relations the complexities of a fraught world." Works include The Death of Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Venus, Topdog/Underdog, and Father Comes Home from the Wars .

• John Keene — for writing that "ith coruscating imagination, language and thought, …experiments with concealed scenes from history and literature, stepping outside the confines of conventional narrative." Works include Annotations and Counternarratives.
• Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi — for work that "opens up a bold and innovatory vista in African letters, encompassing ancient wounds that disquiet the present, and offering the restitution to be found in memory and ritual." She is the author of the novel Kintu.

• Lorna Goodison — for poetry that "draws us into a panoramic history of a woman’s life, bearing witness to female embodiment, the colonial legacy, mortality, and the sacred." She is the author of 13 collections of poetry including I Am Becoming My Mother and Oracabessa.
• Cathy Park Hong — for poetry with "exhilarating and surprising language that connects us to unheard migrant voices, and her searching look at dystopic states which gives her poetry urgent power." Works include Dance Dance Revolution and Engine Empire.

  2019

• Raghu Karnad
• Rebecca Solnit

• Young Jean Lee
• Patricia Cornelius

• Danielle McLaughlin
• David Chariandy

• Ishion Hutchinson
• Kwame Dawes

  2020

• Maria Tumarkin - "Maria Tumarkin's inventive writing on our current historical moment shows a relentless empathy and curiosity about the complexities of our world and its uncertainties."
• Anne Boyer - "With unflinching self-scrutiny, Anne Boyer exposes uncomfortable truths about our culture’s mistreatment of the individual in duress and the ways in which we are complicit in that neglect."

• Aleshea Harris - "Aleshea Harris’s meticulous pageantries of brutal injustice vibrate with rage, grief, hope, and truth, breathing life into ancient forms and indelibly making seen those who were unseen."
• Julia Cho - "In stagecraft intimate with cadences of the spoken and unspoken, Julia Cho enlivens human connection in the languages of home and estrangement."

• Namwali Serpell - "Namwali Serpell reimagines the transmission of modern history through the commingled lives of her Zambian characters, writing unerringly sure prose and re-enchanting the contemporary novel in the process."
• Yiyun Li - "Yiyun Li masterfully explores the landscape of loss with delicacy and precision, restoring the fractured lives of ordinary people on the margins, endowing them with agency and power."

• Bhanu Kapil - "Through transgressive, lyrical language Bhanu Kapil undoes multiple genres to excavate crucial questions of trauma, healing, immigration, and embodiment at the outskirts of performance and process."
• Jonah Mixon-Webster - "With tenderness and ferocity, Jonah Mixon-Webster invents dynamic multi-modal forms to indict structural racism, and to connect the personal to the violence and beauty of history."