Windham-Campbell Festival brings literary star power to campus

The eight recipients of the 2024 Windham-Campbell Prizes, among the world’s most generous and prestigious literary prizes, will come to Yale next week for a four-day festival to celebrate reading and the craft of writing with the local community.

The annual fall festival, which runs Sept. 17 through Sept. 20, will feature a keynote address by Lydia Davis, the renowned short story writer, novelist, and translator, as well as conversations with the latest Windham-Campbell honorees on a broad range of subjects, and readings of their work. All events are free and open to the public.

“Each fall, we are immensely grateful and proud to come together at Yale University to celebrate the wealth of talent across the recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prizes,” said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes. “The brilliance of the 2024 recipients is staggering, and we are delighted to connect these eight writers with audiences across the campus to share experiences, insights, and readings.”

The 2024 recipients, announced on April 2, are, in fiction, Deirdre Madden (who is from Ireland) and Kathryn Scanlan (United States); in nonfiction, Christina Sharpe (Canada/United States) and Hanif Abdurraqib (United States); in drama, Christopher Chen (United States) and Sonya Kelly (Ireland); and in poetry, m. nourbeSe Philip (Canada/Trinidad and Tobago), and Jen Hadfield (Canada/United Kingdom).

The full schedule is available on the Windham-Campbell Prizes website.

Administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (which is part of the Yale University Library), the Windham-Campbell Prizes are conferred annually to eight writers working in English anywhere in the world in recognition of their literary achievement or promise. Each recipient is awarded $175,000 to support their work.

This year’s festival kicks off at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 17, with a welcome party under a tent on Cross Campus featuring music by DJ VNA and free refreshments served by local food trucks.

Yale President Maurie McInnis will confer the prizes at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 18, during a ceremony in the auditorium of the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. (at York Street).

Davis, the author of six collections of short stories and well-regarded English translations of French novels and philosophical works, will deliver a keynote lecture based on the theme “Why I Write.” Her keynote, written especially for the occasion, will be the basis for the next installment of the prize’s “Why I Write” series, published by Yale University Press. (Contributions to the series by the author and rock critic Greil Marcus and the poet Natasha Trethewey, titled “What Nails It” and “The House of Being,” respectively, were recently published.)

The festivities continue Thursday, Sept. 19, with a full day of events featuring this year’s prize recipients.

At noon at the Cross Campus tent, poet m. nourbeSe Philip will mark the 15^th anniversary of “Zong!,” her celebrated poetry cycle concerning the massacre of more than 130 enslaved Africans by the crew of Zong, a British slave ship, so its owners could make an insurance claim. The poem’s words are drawn entirely from records of a court case that concluded that the massacre was legal. Wes Lewis, a Yale graduate student, will accompany Philip on saxophone.

At 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, novelist Deirdre Madden will discuss the topic of “Siblings in Art and Life” with multidisciplinary artist Julia Rooney ’18 M.F.A. in a conversation on the third floor of the Art Gallery.

At 4 p.m. at the Beinecke Library, poet Hanif Abdurraqib and writer Christina Sharpe will have a conversation about Black artistry and performance with Daphne Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 

On Thursday and Friday, Possible Futures, a local bookshop and community reading room, will set up a “book bike” on the sidewalk along College Street near the Cross Campus tent, giving attendees the chance to buy books as they celebrate the written word.

Friday’s schedule includes a conversation at noon under the Cross Campus tent between Sharpe and Nana Adusei-Poku, assistant professor of history of art and African American studies at Yale, about Sharpe’s collection, “Ordinary Notes.” In that collection, Sharpe fuses archival work, cultural criticism, memoir, and photography in a series of 248 numbered notes that reflect on the “ordinary extraordinary matter of black life.”

At 12:30 p.m. on the Art Gallery’s third floor, fiction recipient Kathryn Scanlan and Karin Roffman, a senior lecturer in humanities, English, and American studies and associate director of Public Humanities at Yale, will take a close look at “American Interior” by American precisionist painter Charles Sheeler.

The conversation turns to sports at 4 p.m. on Friday at the Beinecke Library when Abdurraqib will discuss his latest book, “There’s Aways This Year: On Basketball and Ascension,” with James Jones, head coach of the Yale men’s basketball team and one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history.

The festival closes at 7:30 on Friday with all eight prize recipients reading selections of their work in the Art Gallery’s lecture hall.

For the full schedule, visit the Windham-Campbell Prizes website.