The eight recipients of the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prizes will visit the Yale campus next week for a four-day festival to share their work with the local community and celebrate the written word.
The annual fall festival, which runs Sept. 16 through Sept. 19, will feature a keynote address by Kwame Dawes, Jamaica’s poet laureate and a 2019 recipient of the Windham-Campbell prize, as well as conversations with the latest honorees on a broad range of subjects, and readings of their work. All events are free and open to the public.
“We are thrilled to once again gather at Yale to recognize the achievements of the 2025 prize recipients and learn more about their work and perspectives,” said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes. “Providing students and the public the opportunity to interact with the prize recipients in fun and meaningful ways is a highlight of organizing the festival. It’s always rewarding to see the recipients connect with the community as they mark the joys of writing and reading.”
The 2025 recipients, announced on March 24, 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 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. 16, with a welcome event under a tent on Cross Campus. Local food trucks will serve free refreshments.
It’s always rewarding to see the recipients connect with the community as they mark the joys of writing and reading.
Yale President Maurie McInnis will confer the prizes at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 17, during a ceremony in the lecture hall of the Yale Center for British Art, which is located at 1080 Chapel St. in New Haven.
Her comments will be followed by the Dawes’ keynote lecture on the theme “Why I Write.” The lecture, 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. (The series’ latest volume, “Into the Weeds” by the innovative short-story writer Lydia Davis, will be published on Sept. 16.)
At noon on Thursday, Sept. 18, at Cross Campus, 2025 poetry recipient Anthony V. Capildeo will be joined by Fr. Albert Robertson, a Dominican friar, for a conversation on the spiritual and artistic dimensions of Capildeo’s work and the broader role of silence and belief in poetic expression.
At 5:30 p.m. on Thursday at the Beinecke Library, fiction recipients Anne Enright and Sigrid Nunez will discuss the challenges and triumphs of novel writing with moderator Merve Emre, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. At 7 p.m. at the Humanities Quadrangle, there will be a screening of “The Friend,” a 2024 film adaptation of Nunez’s award-winning novel of the same title starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts, followed by a Q&A with the author.
Also on Sept. 18, at 6:30 p.m., there will be staged readings of works by drama recipients Roy Williams and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini in the YCBA’s lecture hall. Students from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale will produce and host the event, presenting selected scenes from the plays of both playwrights.
The program on Friday, Sept. 19 includes “The Art of Playwrighting,” a noontime discussion under the tent at Cross Campus between the drama recipients and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a playwright and a professor in the practice of theater and performance studies in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, whose play “Purpose” won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play.
At 5:30 p.m. on Friday, at the Beinecke Library, nonfiction recipient Rana Dasgupta and Maryam Aslany, a visiting fellow in agrarian studies at Yale, will have a wide-ranging conversation on “The Global Countryside,” drawing from their forthcoming podcast ( which launches on Sept. 18) that will follow the lives of cotton farmers in India. Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, professor of anthropology (FAS) and the environment (Yale School of the Environment), will moderate the discussion.
The festival closes at 7:30 on Friday with all eight prize recipients reading selections of their work in the YCBA’s lecture hall.
For the full schedule, visit the Windham-Campbell Prizes website.
