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British novelist Gwendoline Riley is among eight writers set to receive $175,000 (£130,000) each in recognition of their life’s work.
Australian playwright S Shakthidharan, known as Shakthi, is also among those selected for this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes, which award $1.4m annually to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, with the aim of enabling them to focus on their work free from financial pressures.
Riley is celebrated for her oeuvre of short novels that explore fractured relationships, family tensions and the interior lives of women, including First Love, which was shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction, and My Phantoms. “This is very hard for me to take in,” Riley said. “I am more grateful than I can say. This unimagined vote of confidence will not go wasted on me.”
“Riley’s work recasts our relationship with the familiar, transforming ordinary, unremarkable lives of her characters into something startling and new,” wrote Clare Clark in a review of Riley’s latest novel, The Palm House. “She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with the vertiginous lurch of despair.”
Shakthidharan was selected in recognition of works including his 2019 multigenerational epic Counting and Cracking, which is inspired by the story of his family and traces the history of 20th-century Sri Lanka. It won a swathe of prestigious awards in Australia, including the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature.
In the fiction category, Riley is joined by American writer Adam Ehrlich Sachs, who is awarded the prize for what the judges called his “bravura exploration of the history of knowledge in all of its absurdity, strangeness and difficult beauty”. Sachs is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders.
Belgian-born American writer Lucy Sante is awarded in the nonfiction category – her 2024 memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, follows her process of coming out and transitioning late in life. Jamaican poet, fiction writer and essayist Kei Miller is also awarded for his nonfiction work, including the 2021 essay collection Things I Have Withheld.
In poetry, American poet Joyelle McSweeney is recognised for work that engages with nature, trauma and resilience. Canadian poet Karen Solie also receives the poetry prize for a body of work that explores desire, loss and environmental damage.
Alongside Shakthidharan, American playwright Christina Anderson is awarded in the drama category for her work, which the judges said “mines intersections of intimate and political histories to breathe new life into the social drama”.
The “financial security” that comes with the grant allows writers “the time, space and creative freedom to think, write and nurture their talent” said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell prizes, adding that the arts are “facing more challenges now than ever before”.
Past recipients of the award include Olivia Laing, Anne Enright, Tessa Hadley, Edmund de Waal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Percival Everett, Teju Cole and Pankaj Mishra.
