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Clockwise from left: Olivia Laing Lorna Goodison Suzan-Lori Parks Lucas Hnath Sarah Bakewell John Keene
2018 Windham-Campbell winners, clockwise from top left: Olivia Laing, Lorna Goodison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lucas Hnath, Sarah Bakewell, and John Keene
2018 Windham-Campbell winners, clockwise from top left: Olivia Laing, Lorna Goodison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lucas Hnath, Sarah Bakewell, and John Keene

Writers learn they have won life-changing Windham-Campbell prizes

This article is more than 6 years old

Judged in secret, eight English-language authors are set to hear of $165,000 awards, intended to give them financial freedom

The lives of eight writers are set to be transformed on Wednesday, when they receive a phone call from the director of the Windham-Campbell prizes, informing them that they have each won a $165,000 (£119,000) award that is intended to give them the freedom to write, liberated from money worries.

Recipients, who this year include British writer Olivia Laing and Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, are nominated confidentially and judged anonymously. The first time they will learn that they were in the running will be when programme director Michael Kelleher calls them to let them know they have won. Kelleher said making the calls was his “highlight of the year, as each cycle I hear how much of a difference it will make for them”.

Laing, who examined isolation in The Lonely City, and set her own experiences of growing up in an alcoholic family alongside the lives of male alcoholic authors in The Trip to Echo Spring, was cited as a writer who “searches the depths of the self” through her writing. Judges described her as “a cartographer of human emotion, mixing memoir, biography and critical engagement with an acute sense of place”. Goodison was praised for poetry that “draws us into a panoramic history of a woman’s life, bearing witness to female embodiment, the colonial legacy, mortality, and the sacred”.

Another UK author, Sarah Bakewell, was chosen for unknotting “complex philosophical thought with verve and wit; her eye for detail and her animated conversation bring[ing] readers to inhabit the lives of great philosophers”. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, a Ugandan author living in Manchester who has published one novel, Kintu, was cited for fiction that “opens up a bold and innovatory vista in African letters, encompassing ancient wounds that disquiet the present, and offering the restitution to be found in memory and ritual”.

US playwrights Lucas Hnath and Suzan-Lori Parks and their compatriots, novelist John Keene and poet Cathy Park Hong, are also recipients of awards this year.

Previous winners have spoken of what the money means to them. Australian author Helen Garner, who initially left the email informing her of her win in her junk folder because she thought it was a scam, said she could “die happy” after winning, while British novelist Tessa Hadley said it “changed my writing life”.

The awards, which go to English-language writers from anywhere in the world, were set up in 2013 by the late Donald Windham, in memory of his partner of 40 years, Sandy M Campbell. “Six years on, we can now see the impact the prizes have on these writers’ lives, careers and work. The feeling is magical,” said Kelleher.

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