Kei Miller on Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens

Prize Director Michael Kelleher talks with 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction recipient Kei Miller about Yuval Noah Harari’s sprawling and sometimes controversial book Sapiens and about how humanity is fiction (and vice-versa).

Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, essayist, and novelist, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and winner of the prestigious Forward poetry prize for his collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. His most recent book is the essay collection Things I Have Withheld, out in 2021. His story collection Fear of Stones was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and his most recent novel, Augustown was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature and in 2018 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter and, in 2019, he was the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a production of Literary Hub

Hosted by Michael Kelleher

Theme music by Dani Lencioni

Produced and edited by Drew Broussard