The eight winners of the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prizes have been announced. 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 of $175,000, intended “to support their work and allow them to focus on their creative practice independent of financial concerns.” Here are this year’s winners, along with brief citations from the anonymous selection committee:
FICTION:
Sigrid Nunez (United States)
“With each careful, concise novel, Sigrid Nunez scrupulously dissects the ethical complications of authorship, while still enacting—soulfully, quietly, paradoxically—the visceral and emotional force of character and story.”
Anne Enright (Ireland)
“In her wide-ranging and wryly unsentimental fiction, Anne Enright explores the limitations and joys of our human need for belonging.”
NONFICTION:
Patricia J. Williams (United States)
“In incisive works of moral philosophy and cultural critique, Patricia J. Williams draws together history, memoir, and legal scholarship to reckon with urgent issues of our time.”
Rana Dasgupta (United Kingdom)
“Rana Dasgupta captures contemporary capitalism’s visions and challenges with unflinching candor, and through delicately layered perspectives, allows his subjects to reveal themselves in a world of dissonances.”
DRAMA:
Roy Williams (United Kingdom)
“Roy Williams’s nuanced, multivocal portrayals of race and class lay bare uncomfortable truths about British identity, creating an essential and complex theater of contemporary life.”
Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (United Kingdom)
“Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini’s exuberant plays barrel onto the stage with joyful abandon, loosening the knots in the fabric of our socio-political lives with forensic attention to reveal new, hopeful ways of remaking the world”
POETRY:
Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago)
“Anthony V. Capildeo’s poems are immersed equally in narrative and lyric, querying forms with an insistent playfulness and a radical political consciousness.”
Tongo Eisen-Martin (United States)
“With unambiguous purpose and a distinctive voice, Tongo Eisen-Martin puts injustice, love, and intergenerational memory to work in verse that is both surreal and revolutionary.”
