The Donald Windham Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes are an American literary award which offers unrestricted grants in four categories, namely fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Established at Yale University in 2011, the first prizes were presented in 2013.[1][2][3] Administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the award recognizes English language writers from across the world. The mission of the award is to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. In 2017 the category of poetry was added and eight prizes have been awarded annually since then.
Since 2023, winners receive a citation, award and an unrestricted grant of $175,000. The individual prizes are among the richest literary prize amounts in the world, if not the richest in certain categories.[1] The award is endowed from the combined estates of writer Donald Windham and actor Sandy Campbell. Campbell was Windham's companion of 45 years, and when Campbell died in 1988 he left his estate to Windham with the understanding a literary award would be created from the combined estate after Windham's death.[1] Windham died in 2010, and in 2011 Yale announced they would become administrators of the new award.
The inaugural winners were announced on March 4, 2013, and a ceremony conferring the awards took place at Yale on September 10, 2013 with the nine recipients receiving a citation, award and an unrestricted grant of $150,000 each.[4]
Stephen Adly Guirgis: "Stephen Adly Guirgis writes dramatic dialogue with passion and humor, creating characters who live on the edge, and whose linguistic bravado reinvigorates the American vernacular."
Tarell Alvin McCraney: "Tarell Alvin McCraney’s working class characters inhabit an extraordinary mythic universe, speaking a poetic language through which we grasp the spiritual stature of embattled people."
Zoë Wicomb: "Zoë Wicomb’s subtle, lively language and beautifully crafted narratives explore the complex entanglements of home, and the continuing challenges of being in the world."
Adina Hoffman: "In a land where even the most cautious nonfiction can draw howls of protest, Adina Hoffman combines fastidious listening, even-handed research, and prose so engaged that it makes the long-vanished visible again."
Jeremy Scahill: "Jeremy Scahill’s investigative reporting is in the best tradition of speaking truth to power, waging a political campaign by journalistic means, indefatigable in its detail and international in outlook."
Jonny Steinberg: "Using a novelistic style that gives everyday people heroic complexity and scale, Jonny Steinberg allows us to encounter lives that enlarge our empathy and sharpen our understanding of the human condition."
Kia Corthron: "Through her command of dramatic spectacle, Kia Corthron places often unheard and marginalized characters within a historical and political context that gives their lives an urgent and poetic resonance."
Sam Holcroft: "Sam Holcroft’s plays explore the routinized and expressive registers of language, gesture, and role-playing, walking the uncomfortably thin line between spectatorship and complicity."
Noëlle Janaczewska: "Noëlle Janaczewska brings innovative stagecraft and a questioning voice to plays that translate cultural and political tensions into drama as complex as it is illuminating."
Jim Crace: "Jim Crace's ever-varied novels return us to the body, to ceremony and to community in a disenchanted world, transforming the indifferent and the repugnant alike into things of beauty."
Aminatta Forna: "Aminatta Forna writes through and beyond personal experience to speak to the wider world in subtly constructed narratives that reveal the ongoing aftershocks of living through violence and war."
Pankaj Mishra: "Pursuing high standards of literary style, Pankaj Mishra gives us new narratives about the evolution of modern Asia. He charts the journey from the Indian small town to the metropolis and rebuffs imperialist clichés with equal verve."
John Vaillant: "John Vaillant writes gripping narratives that combine science, geography, history and anthropology to convey his passionate commitment to preserving natural resources in an environmentally threatened world."
Helen Edmundson: "Helen Edmundson’s ambitious plays distill historical complexities through characters whose passions and ethical dilemmas mirror and illuminate a larger political landscape."
Debbie Tucker Green: "Pushing speech and silence to the limit, Debbie Tucker Green’s plays expose the brutal choices of individuals bound by the imperatives of family, society, and love."
Teju Cole: "Teju Cole’s peripatetic narrators, like his prose, revel in the possibilities and limitations of global urbanity, navigating the fine line between choice and circumstance, perception and memory."
Helon Habila: "Helon Habila is that rare combination of storyteller and stylist who challenges expectations while deepening our empathy for ordinary people confronting extraordinary times."
Ivan Vladislavic: "Ivan Vladislavić’s fiction explores the uncomfortable aftermath of apartheid through inventive meditations on the complex intersection of history, politics, and art."
Edmund de Waal: "Edmund de Waal’s sure narrative instinct and lyrical imagination inform a deeply felt examination of the hold that objects have on our personal and collective memory."
Geoff Dyer: "Omnivorously curious and psychologically probing, Geoff Dyer’s writings reinvent again and again the possibilities of nonfiction, discovering as many new subjects as he does ways of writing about them."
John Jeremiah Sullivan: "John Jeremiah Sullivan’s wide-ranging, exuberant essays engage the full spectrum of American life with passion, precision, and wit."
Lucas Hnath for "agile writing which ranges across genres and subjects with voracious curiosity; his wit, formal daring and poetic precision crystallize dramas that are socially incisive and indelible." Works include The Christians (2014) and A Doll's House, Part 2 (2017).
Suzan-Lori Parks: for being "an artist whose ethical imagination confronts rather than consoles; she acknowledges in the fissures of language and human relations the complexities of a fraught world." Works include The Death of Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1992), Venus (1996), Topdog/Underdog (2001), and Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (2014).
John Keene: for writing that "[w]ith coruscating imagination, language and thought, …experiments with concealed scenes from history and literature, stepping outside the confines of conventional narrative." Works include Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2015).
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: for work that "opens up a bold and innovatory vista in African letters, encompassing ancient wounds that disquiet the present, and offering the restitution to be found in memory and ritual." She is the author of the novel Kintu (2014).
Sarah Bakewell for work that "unknots complex philosophical thought with verve and wit; her eye for detail and her animated conversation bring readers to inhabit the lives of great philosophers." Works include How to Live: A Life of Montaigne (2010) and At the Existentialist Café (2016).
Olivia Laing for being "a cartographer of human emotion, mixing memoir, biography and critical engagement with an acute sense of place; through the arts, she searches the depths of the self." Works include To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), and The Lonely City (2016).
Lorna Goodison for poetry that "draws us into a panoramic history of a woman’s life, bearing witness to female embodiment, the colonial legacy, mortality, and the sacred." She is the author of 13 collections of poetry including I Am Becoming My Mother (1986) and Oracabessa (2013).
Cathy Park Hong for poetry with "exhilarating and surprising language that connects us to unheard migrant voices, and her searching look at dystopic states which gives her poetry urgent power." Works include Dance Dance Revolution (2007) and Engine Empire (2012).
Julia Cho: "In stagecraft intimate with cadences of the spoken and unspoken, Julia Cho enlivens human connection in the languages of home and estrangement."
Aleshea Harris: "Aleshea Harris’s meticulous pageantries of brutal injustice vibrate with rage, grief, hope, and truth, breathing life into ancient forms and indelibly making seen those who were unseen."
Yiyun Li: "Yiyun Li masterfully explores the landscape of loss with delicacy and precision, restoring the fractured lives of ordinary people on the margins, endowing them with agency and power."
Namwali Serpell: "Namwali Serpell reimagines the transmission of modern history through the commingled lives of her Zambian characters, writing unerringly sure prose and re-enchanting the contemporary novel in the process."
Anne Boyer: "With unflinching self-scrutiny, Anne Boyer exposes uncomfortable truths about our culture’s mistreatment of the individual in duress and the ways in which we are complicit in that neglect."
Maria Tumarkin: "Maria Tumarkin's inventive writing on our current historical moment shows a relentless empathy and curiosity about the complexities of our world and its uncertainties."
Bhanu Kapil: "Through transgressive, lyrical language Bhanu Kapil undoes multiple genres to excavate crucial questions of trauma, healing, immigration, and embodiment at the outskirts of performance and process."
Jonah Mixon-Webster: "With tenderness and ferocity, Jonah Mixon-Webster invents dynamic multi-modal forms to indict structural racism, and to connect the personal to the violence and beauty of history."
↑ The prizewinners with the following citations were announced by Yale president-elect Peter Salovey on March 4, 2013. Each winner received $150,000.
↑ The prizewinners with the following citations were announced by Yale president Peter Salovey on March 7, 2014.
↑ The prizewinners with the following citations were announced by Yale president Peter Salovey on February 24, 2015.
↑ The prizewinners were announced on February 29, 2016. The prize highlighted some works by each author.
↑ The prizewinners were announced March 1, 2017. The authors were chosen for their "literary achievement or promise" and the reward money of $165,000 each would support their continued writing.
↑ The prizewinners were announced on March 7, 2018. The recipients of the $165,000 prize to support their work and give them freedom to write.
↑ The prizewinners were announced March 12, 2019. The authors were chosen for their "literary achievement or promise" and the reward money of $165,000 each would support their continued writing.
↑ The prize winners were announced March 19, 2020. Each winner received $165,000.
↑ The prize winners were announced March 29, 2022. The writers were honored for their literary achievement or promise. Each will receive $165,000 to support their work.
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