The recipients of the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prizes have been announced. This year’s winning writers include Sigrid Nunez and Anne Enright, for fiction; Patricia J. Williams and Rana Dasgupta, for nonfiction; Roy Williams and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, for drama; and Anthony V. Capildeo and Tongo Eisen-Martin, for poetry.
Nunez and Patricia J. Williams hail from the United States; Dasgupta, Ibini, and Roy Williams from the U.K.; Enright from Ireland; and Capildeo from Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago. Each writer will receive $175,000 to support their work.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes were first awarded in 2013, since which point they have awarded more than $19 million in prize money to English-language writers worldwide. The prizes are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and nominees are considered by judges who remain anonymous before and after the prize announcement. Previous winners include Hanif Abdurraqib, Percival Everett, Vivian Gornick, Cathy Park Hong, Margo Jefferson, Ling Ma, and Christina Sharpe.
“Each year, eight writers receive an unexpected call sharing the life-changing news that they have been awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize, offering $175,000 and with it the opportunity to create their work independent of financial concerns," said prize director Michael Kelleher, in a statement. “It was the late Donald Windham’s wish in establishing these prizes to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with time, space and freedom. This mission remains at the heart of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, and in today’s world it is more vital than ever to recognize and support the crucial work and wisdom that writers share with us all.”
