Yale University on March 24 announced the eight recipients of the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prizes, one of the world’s most significant international literary awards. The recipients, honored for their literary achievement or promise, will each receive $175,000 to support their work.
The recipients are, in fiction, Sigrid Nunez (United States) and Anne Enright (Ireland); in nonfiction, Patricia J. Williams (United States) and Rana Dasgupta (United Kingdom); in drama, Roy Williams (United Kingdom) and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (United Kingdom); and in poetry, Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago) and Tongo Eisen-Martin (United States).
The recipients, who are nominated confidentially and judged anonymously, did not know they were under consideration until Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell prizes, personally delivered the news of their selection in mid-February.
“Each year, eight writers receive an unexpected call sharing the life-changing news,” Kelleher said. “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.”
The awards will be presented in person in the fall during an annual international literary festival at Yale.
The prizes were established in 2013 through a gift from writer Donald Windham in memory of Sandy Campbell, his partner of 40 years. Administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, part of Yale University Library, they are conferred annually to writers working in English anywhere in the world in fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Writers can be awarded the prize during any stage of their careers. To date, 107 writers from 22 countries have received the prize.
“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,” said fiction recipient Anne Enright, whose work explores the theme of the family through potent and elegant domestic portraits, and deceptively simple language. “I am floored by the Windham-Campbell Prize’s generosity and goodwill.”
Enright’s eight novels include “The Gathering,” which was awarded the 2007 Booker Prize, an international award for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language and published in the UK and Ireland.
Fiction recipient Sigrid Nunez has authored 10 books, including the novel “The Friend,” which won the 2018 National Book Award, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States. In her recent work, including “The Vulnerables” (2023) and “What Are You Going Through” (2020), Nunez’s unnamed narrators confront grief and loss.
Nonfiction recipient Patricia J. Williams is the former “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” columnist for The Nation and the author of six books. Her 2024 book, “The Miracle of the Black Leg,” leverages her background as a contracts law scholar and journalist’s sense of curiosity to explore themes of identity, ethics, and race.
“I am literally floating — this much pure joy is electric!” she said. “Honestly, what an amazing gift, to be able to write, and to just write!”
Through a combination of reporting and oral history, nonfiction recipient Rana Dasgupta’s 2014 book, “Capital: The Eruption of Delhi,” offers a portrait of India’s capital city, and the dizzying transformation it underwent at the turn of the 21st century. His forthcoming book, “After Nations,” explores the “generalized state of crisis” afflicting the nation-state worldwide.
Drama recipient Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini’s 2014 debut play “Muscovado,” set on a 19th-century sugar plantation in Barbados, portrays slavery’s brutality and a counternarrative of Black love and friendship amidst violence. Ibini’s Olivier Award-winning 2023 play “Sleepova” is a love letter to Black girls and takes as its setting a sleepover between four friends.
“I am over the moon and currently hurtling through space somewhere near Jupiter… just marvelling at all of this: the past, the present, and the crystallizing future,” Ibini said. “I am eternally grateful to my ancestors and everyone who has helped me get this far. And so appreciative to everyone involved at the Windham-Campbell Prizes for this thoughtful injection into my career.”
Since his 1996 debut “The No Boys Cricket Club,” drama recipient Roy Williams has authored 15 plays. Known for his nuanced portrayals of race and class, Williams leverages his powers of observation to reveal how the simmering pressures of contemporary life can explode into unchecked hatred.
Poetry recipient Tongo Eisen-Martin, a former poet laureate for the City of San Francisco, is the author of three collections of poetry: “Blood on the Fog” (2021), selected by The New York Times as among the Best Poetry of 2021; “Heaven is All Goodbyes” (2017); and “Someone’s Dead Already” (2015).
Poet Anthony V. Capildeo has published nine collections of poetry and eight chapbooks. Capildeo’s 2024 poetry collection, “Polkadot Wounds,” was cited by The Guardian as among the best in recent poetry.
“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,” Capildeo said. “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!”
Biographies of the recipients and additional background on the prizes, including past recipients, are available on the Windham-Campbell Prizes website.
