Yale University on April 8 announced the eight recipients of the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prizes, one of the world’s most significant international literary awards. Honored for their literary achievement or promise, the recipients have created works that examine intimacy, identity, absurdity, and truth.
The recipients are, in fiction, Gwendoline Riley (United Kingdom) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs (United States); in nonfiction, Lucy Sante (United States/Belgium) and Kei Miller (Jamaica); in drama, Christina Anderson (United States) and S. Shakthidharan (Australia/Sri Lanka); and in poetry, Joyelle McSweeney (United States) and Karen Solie (Canada).
Each will receive $175,000 to support their work.
Nominated confidentially and judged anonymously, the recipients 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.
“The late Donald Windham established these prizes to call attention to literary achievement across writing disciplines and provide writers with the time, space, and freedom to work,” Kelleher said. “In this challenging time for the arts, it is an honor to celebrate this year’s recipients and ensure that the world will continue to enjoy their creativity and insights for many years to come.”
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 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, 115 writers from 24 countries have received the prize.
This extraordinary news arrived at a moment of unusually deep doubt about the writing life. I can’t express how grateful I am for such a remarkable gift and for the freedom — financial, psychological — it affords.
Gwendoline Riley is celebrated for her oeuvre of short novels, including “First Love” (2017), in which she explores women’s experiences in the early 21st century. Her novels “lay bare the cruelties and complicities of intimacy in prose that is at once meticulous and ruthless,” according to the prize citation.
Adam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of three works of fiction: “Gretel and the Great War” (2024), “The Organs of Sense” (2019), and “Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems” (2016). The judges called his philosophical fiction “a bravura exploration of the history of knowledge in all of its absurdity, strangeness, and difficult beauty.”
“This extraordinary news arrived at a moment of unusually deep doubt about the writing life,” Ehrlich Sachs said. “I can’t express how grateful I am for such a remarkable gift and for the freedom — financial, psychological — it affords.”
Writer, editor, and memoirist Lucy Sante is recognized for her extensive contributions to nonfiction, including “I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition,” which chronicles the author’s gender transition in her late ’60s and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2024 by The New York Times.
“Legendary cultural critic, urban historian, and literary reporter, Lucy Sante focuses keen attention on overlooked facets of human experience and expands possibilities for nonfiction,” states her citation.
Kei Miller is the author of 11 books, including “Things I Have Withheld” (2021), a collection of interconnected essays that blends memoir and literary commentary in an exploration of the silences that often mark conversations about race, sex, and gender. His “lyrical and trenchant essays hold a range of writerly selves and reveal deep and unsettling truths about the limits of language and the raced and gendered body moving through the world,” according to the citation.
“I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I have secretly envied Windham-Campbell winners in the past,” Miller said. “Honestly, winning it now, I feel both thrilled, and a little repentant.”
The judges recognized dramatist Christina Anderson for the mark she has left on American theater with works such as “Inked Baby” (2009) and “the ripple, the wave that carried me home” (2022).
“In her deeply moving and beautifully layered plays, Christina Anderson mines intersections of intimate and political histories to breathe new life into the social drama as a form of ethical and metaphysical inquiry,” states her citation.
Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan was recognized for his ambition and scale, and his deep care and understanding of character, as demonstrated in his multigenerational epic “Counting and Cracking” (2019).
“I am still in shock about this tremendous and utterly surprising news,” Shakthidharan said. “To be recognized by a global award of this stature is incredibly affirming, and I suspect it will be life changing.”
Joyelle McSweeney has authored five books of poetry, including her latest, “Death Styles” (2024). Her “wildly imaginative, rageful poems turn decay into sustenance and go on defying death by thriving on rot,” according to the citation.
McSweeney reacted to the prize with excitement and a bit of poetic imagery.
“Sitting at my kitchen table among piles of LEGOs, stickers, half-made Valentines, and sticky books of Surrealist women’s poetry in translation, I find myself suddenly electrified, as if the Universe had lowered her star-cloak and looked me dead in the eye,” McSweeney said. “I now wear an eel for a stole, an eel I stole from Heaven. I feel transformed, elated, and charged with a very large charge.”
Karen Solie has published six books of poetry, including, most recently, “Wellwater” (2025), “The Caiplie Caves” (2019), and “The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out” (2015). Her work which demonstrates an ability to distill philosophy, desire, and doubt into simultaneously gritty and luminous language, the judges said.
“Through precise, profound, and wry plain-speaking verse, Karen Solie locates and interrogates the human apprehension of the world of things,” the citation states.
Biographies of the recipients and additional background on the prizes, including a roster of past recipients, are available on the Windham-Campbell Prizes website.
