These 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize winners will be on campus Sept. 15 to 18
Since 2013, the Windham-Campbell Prizes, administered by Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, have been awarded to more than 100 English-language writers from around the world. Established through a gift from the writer Donald Windham, in memory of his life partner, actor and writer Sandy Campbell, the prize is one of the largest and most prestigious literary awards in the world.
This year’s prizewinners are poets Joyelle McSweeney (United States) and Karen Solie (Canada/Scotland), nonfiction writers Kei Miller (Jamaica) and Lucy Sante (United States/Belgium), playwrights Christina Anderson (United States) and S. Shakthidharan (Australia/Sri Lanka), and fiction writers Gwendoline Riley (United Kingdom) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs (United States).
The prize recipients will be on Yale’s campus from Sept. 15 to Sept. 18 for the Windham-Campbell Prizes Festival to share their work, engage in conversation, and celebrate reading and writing with members of the Yale and New Haven communities. All events are free and open to the public. A full schedule of events will be available at windhamcampbell.org in August.
Read about the 2026 prize recipients and past prizewinners.
Watch a video of this year’s winners when first hearing the good news. Learn more about each of them in the article in Yale News.
The Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell Papers, held at Beinecke Library, contain more than 70 boxes of writings, correspondence, photographs, artwork, and other papers by or relating to Windham and Campbell.
