The 2025 laureates of the Windham-Campbell Prizes are, top row from left, Tongo Eisen-Martin (image: Allison Busch); Anthony V. Capildeo (image: Rachel Hein); Sigrid Nunez (image: Adam Lerner); and Roy Williams (image: Chris Boland). On the lower row, from left, are Patricia J. Williams (image: Michael Brook); Rana Dasgupta (image: Joshua Labatique); Matilda Feyisayo Ibini (image: Chris Boland) and Anne Enright (image: Paul Napo)
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also: Windham-Campbell’s Windham-Campbell: ‘Not a Book Award’
No Longlist, No Shortlist, No Warning: $175,000
Although the spring collision of publishing events have delayed our release of this information, we want to bring you the news of the eight recipients of this year’s international Windham-Campbell Prizes, based in the United States at Yale.
As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall, this is the program that annually hands a grant worth US$175,000 to each of eight practitioners. The unsuspecting recipients work in four categories: fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.
Having begun its work in 2006, the Windham-Campbell over the years has awarded more than $19 million—a total $1.4 million this year. The program’s endowment was created from the estate of the late Guggenheim Fellow Donald Windham, folding in a major inheritance from his longtime companion, the actor and model Sandy Campbell who died unexpectedly in 1988 after the couple had discussed the idea of the award.
The prizes are administered by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and nominees for the prizes are considered by judges who remain anonymous both before and after the prize announcement. In fact, the program recently issued a warning about a scam in which writers are told that someone can get them nominated for a Windham-Campbell Prize. “This is a scam,” the program responds. “Our judges are anonymous and would never contact writers about nominations.
Part of the thrill, the mystique, and the standing of this honor, in fact, is that it cannot be lobbied for, and recipients are caught totally off-guard when director Michael Kelleher calls them with the news.
The internationalism of the program comes from two of its regulations: recipients must write in the English language, but may live in any part of the world.
2025 Windham-Campbell Prize Recipients
In our list, the links on each of this year’s name is linked to information about that writer on the Windham-Campbell site. Each of these profiles includes a very carefully and thoughtfully made video of commentary from the recipient.
- Anne Enright (Ireland) – fiction
- Sigrid Nunez (United States) – 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
In commenting on this year’s recipients, Kelleher—himself a published poet—says, “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’s more vital than ever to recognize and support the crucial work and wisdom that writers share with us all.”
As Anne Enright, the Dublin-born first Irish Windham-Campbell laureate is quoted saying, “The sense of unreality has not left me since the news came in—what an astonishing thing to drop out of a clear blue sky. I am floored by the Windham-Campbell Prize’s generosity and goodwill.”
And the Trinidad native Anthony Vahni Capildeo, who lives in the United Kingdom, says, “It’s the most wonderful thing to feel connected to people (living and dead) who cared so much for the freedom of creative expression as to found and administer this prize; it gives me courage, and also the means to be more consistently present to my communities.
“Winning the Windham-Campbell Prize has lifted weights that I didn’t even know were oppressing me internally; it’s beyond anything I looked for in my ordinary writer’s life.
“First it Knocked me Flat, but Now I’m Bouncing!”
Here’s a video produced by the program about Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell, and the prizes that now bear their names.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Windham-Hill Prizes is here, and more on the many international book and publishing awards is here.