Yale University, New Haven, January 22 2026: Today, the Windham-Campbell Prizes have announced a new winter season of the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast will begin on February 4 2026, as part of an ongoing partnership with literary website LitHub.
The new season will comprise of four episodes, each featuring a Windham-Campbell Prize alumnus: Geoff Dyer, award-winning author of But Beautiful and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (United Kingdom, Nonfiction, 2015), Adina Hoffman, critically acclaimed essayist and biographer (United States, Nonfiction, 2013), Michael R. Jackson, playwright, composer and lyricist of the Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop (United States, Drama, 2021), and Marina Carr, award-winning playwright known for The Mai and By the Bog of Cats (Ireland, Drama, 2017).
Hosted by Michael Kelleher, Director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, each episode features a conversation with a previous prize recipient, speaking about their chosen book and reflecting on their fascinating writing lives and careers.
The first episode launches on February 4, with a new episode releasing every week.
– Geoff Dyer discusses A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, the award-winning Barthesian novel by Xiaolu Guo exploring love, language and identity (February 4)
– Adina Hoffman chooses An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec, a meticulous, enigmatic and melancholy observation of everyday life as experienced by Perec in Saint-Sulpice Square (February 11)
– Michael R. Jackson selects The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Sam Greenlee’s cult classic novel that critically examines the racism, violence, and oppression lived by Black Americans through the spy thriller genre (February 18)
– Marina Carr considers To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, a modernist masterpiece that reveals the complexity of inner lives and subjectivity of human experience (February 25)
The Windham-Campbell Prizes are a major global prize that recognises eight writers each year for literary achievement across four categories – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. With annual prize money exceeding $1.4m USD – and total prize money awarded over the past decade at over $20m USD – they are one of the most significant prizes in the world. Each recipient is gifted an unrestricted grant to support their writing and allow them to focus on their work independent of financial concerns rewarding each with $175,000.
Previous recipients include Anne Enright (Fiction, Ireland, 2025), Sigrid Nunez (Fiction, United States, 2025), Hanif Abdurraqib (Nonfiction, United States, 2024), Percival Everett (Fiction, United States, 2023), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Fiction, Zimbabwe, 2022), Margo Jefferson (Nonfiction, United States, 2022), Vivian Gornick (Nonfiction, United States, 2021), Bhanu Kapil (Poetry, United Kingdom, 2020), Kwame Dawes (Poetry, United States, Jamaica, Ghana, 2019), Cathy Park Hong (Poetry, United States, 2018), Marina Carr (Drama, Ireland, 2017), Helen Garner (Nonfiction, Australia, 2016), Edmund de Waal (Nonfiction, United Kingdom, 2015), Teju Cole (Fiction, United States/Nigeria, 2015), Helon Habila (Fiction, Nigeria, 2015), Pankaj Mishra (Fiction, India, 2014), and Jeremy Scahill (Nonfiction, United States, 2013).
The Prizes were the brainchild of lifelong partners Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell. The couple were deeply involved in literary circles, collected books avidly, read voraciously as well as penning various works. For years they had discussed the idea of creating an award to highlight literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. When Campbell passed away unexpectedly in 1988, Windham took on the responsibility for making this shared dream a reality. The first prizes were announced in 2013.
The Prizes are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and nominees for the Prizes are considered by judges who remain anonymous before and after the prize announcement. Recipients write in the English language and may live in any part of the world.
The podcast is available at Apple Podcasts or via your preferred platform.
ABOUT THE WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZE RECIPIENTS
Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and numerous books of nonfiction. Whether wrestling with the specter of D. H. Lawrence (Out of Sheer Rage, 1997), “summarizing the action” of a famously slow-moving Tarkovsky film (Zona, 2012), or narrating his stay aboard an aircraft carrier (Another Great Day at Sea, 2014), Dyer’s genre-defying explorations have earned him universal admiration as singularly restless and original in his vision. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Giles Harvey noted approvingly, “This prowling and capricious nature has produced one of the strangest bodies of work in contemporary letters.” In addition to his book-length works, Dyer has written essays and reviews for a variety of publications, a selection of which are collected in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) and awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England and currently resides in Los Angeles. His first memoir, Homework, was published in 2025.
Adina Hoffman is the author of five nonfiction books that expand and enrich our understanding of the modern Middle East through their juxtaposition of personal and political histories. In My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century (2010), Hoffman’s meticulously researched and vividly written biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali becomes a window into the fate of the Palestinian people in the wake of the 1948 war and its ensuing displacements. Hoffman divides her time between New Haven and Jerusalem, and House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood (2002) provides an intimate portrait of the divided city. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2011), written with Peter Cole, tells the story of the recovery of a trove of Jewish manuscripts in Egypt and the scholars who study it. Hoffman is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent book, a biography of the filmmaker Ben Hecht, was published by Yale University Press in February 2019.
Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1981, Michael R. Jackson is a composer, lyricist, and playwright. His 2020 musical, White Girl in Danger, is inspired by a plethora of pop culture influences, from Lifetime original movies of the 1990s with titles like Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? and She Cried No to that most serial of serial forms, the daytime soap opera of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The play’s protagonist is a young Black woman who longs to be as in distress and un-stoical as her white counterparts—a narrative situation revealing Jackson’s real affection for his sources even while he subverts them, often for sharply humorous ends. A Strange Loop (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2020), asks questions about identity—particularly Black male queer identity—in telling the story of a twenty-something Black gay man named Usher who, appropriately, works as an usher during a run of The Lion King on Broadway. Usher constantly obsesses over “the latest draft of his self-referential musical”; that musical, like the one he is in, is called A Strange Loop. This doubling, even tripling, of references is just one of the devices that Jackson deploys to recreate the strange and cruel hall of mirrors that is Usher’s selfhood. Bawdy, bright, and brutal, by turns anguished and joyful, Jackson’s work reflects our own reality even while it tries to create possibilities for better, more expansive worlds. The recipient of many awards, including a Lambda Literary Award for Drama (2020), a Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting (2019), and a Whiting Award (2019), Jackson holds a BFA in Playwriting and an MFA in Musical Theater Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Marina Carr is a singular voice in world theater. The author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed plays, she came to international attention with The Mai (1994), the first in a trilogy of plays inspired by the works of Euripides and Sophocles. Like its successors Portia Coughlin (1996) and By the Bog of Cats (1998), The Mai utterly reinvents its source material, finding an ancient darkness in the hills and valleys of contemporary Ireland. Carr’s persistent focus in both the “Midland Trilogy” and her other work is female experience in its most mythic and paradoxical aspects: the power and vulnerability it embodies, the desire and disgust it provokes. In Ariel (2002), a sixteen-year-old girl suffers violence at the hands of her father, a religious fanatic; in Woman and Scarecrow (2008), a dying woman—mother to eight children and wife to an unfaithful husband—considers her failed struggles to gain agency in her own life. Hecuba, which premiered at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in September 2015, continues to explore the cultural and political marginalization of women. While dark and often disturbing, Hecuba is also fiercely compassionate, revealing what the playwright describes as her own “love for people, for the human condition—the fragility of it.” Carr, who teaches at Dublin City University, is the winner of a Puterbaugh Fellowship (2012), the E. M. Forster Award (2001), and a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (1997), among many other honors.
About the Windham-Campbell Prizes
Established in 2013 with a significant gift from Donald Windham in memory of his partner of 40 years, Sandy Campbell, the Windham-Campbell Prizes are among the richest and most prestigious literary prizes on earth. The community, camaraderie, diversity, and inclusive nature of the Prizes honors the spirit of their lives. www.windhamcampbell.org @WindhamCampbell
