Here are the winners of the 2024 Windham-Campbell Prizes.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes has announced this year’s eight winners, each of whom will receive an $175,000 award. This annual prize recognizes excellence in fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry written in the English language from anywhere in the world, and is offered as an unrestricted grant to support the recipients’ further writing. Stay tuned for conversations with all eight writers on the next season of The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast—in the meantime, here are this year’s winners, along with the citations from the anonymous Windham-Campbell selection committee:
FICTION:
Kathryn Scanlan (United States)
“Blending documentary and fiction, Kathryn Scanlan fuses mundane experiences with the density of a redemptive vision, capturing the harrowing events of ordinary lives in raw, hard-hitting prose.”
Deirdre Madden (Ireland)
“Deirdre Madden’s novels bring to life the smallest movements of characters’ impulses and thoughts, portraying the intricacies of human lives with compassion and effortless depth.”
NONFICTION:
Christina Sharpe (Canada/United States)
“Recalibrating images of black existence, Christina Sharpe’s incisive, multi-layered work demands that we wrestle with brutality as we create meaning through language and art.”
Hanif Abdurraqib (United States)
“Hanif Abdurraqib turns a poet’s gaze toward cultural archives, finds grace in the kinetic energy of performing bodies, and shows us how to find joy and generosity in unlikely places.”
DRAMA:
Christopher Chen (United States)
“Christopher Chen challenges our relationship to truth and accuracy, spectatorship and performance, repeatedly disrupting our expectations of drama and form.”
Sonya Kelly (Ireland)
“Sonya Kelly’s plays sparkle with the quirkiness of the everyday, exploding fleeting moments into lyrical revelations, as she grapples with human fragility and pathos.”
POETRY:
Jen Hadfield (United Kingdom)
“Jen Hadfield’s intricate poems slow down time, reveal overlooked details of the natural world, and forge complex relationships between language, history, and place.”
m. nourbeSe philip (Canada/Trinidad and Tobago)
“Inventing derelict tongues of refusal, m. nourbeSe philip breaks open and reimagines the horror of official speech and how it acts, creating a genre-obliterating poetry.”
