WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZES ANNOUNCE 2023 RECIPIENTS, REVEALING HIDDEN & DEEPLY PERSONAL STORIES
PERCIVAL EVERETT | LING MA | SUSAN WILLIAMS | DARRAN ANDERSON
DOMINIQUE MORISSEAU | JASMINE LEE-JONES | ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS | DG NANOUK OKPIK
www.windhamcampbell.org | #WindhamCampbell | @WindhamCampbell |
(l-r: PERCIVAL EVERETT | LING MA | SUSAN WILLIAMS | DARRAN ANDERSON
DOMINIQUE MORISSEAU | JASMINE LEE-JONES | ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS | DG NANOUK OKPIK)
“With all going on in the world, it is beyond joyous to learn that my work and voice matters and I'm being encouraged to continue on! As an artist, the ability to continue to make a living telling stories is vital to my growth and mission in life, and awards like these help to make a pathway for my creativity and passion to thrive. It's thrilling and inspiring!” Dominique Morisseau
Yale University, New Haven, Tuesday 4 April 2023: Today, the Windham-Campbell Prizes have announced this year’s recipients of a $175,000 award to support their work. Celebrating both literary legends and emerging talent, the list includes the critically acclaimed novelist Percival Everett, TONY nominated writer Dominique Morisseau, Iñupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, and trailblazing playwright Jasmine Lee-Jones – the youngest ever recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize.
This major global prize 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 almost $16m 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, marking a $10,000 increase from previous years.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes 2023 recipients are:
- Percival Everett (United States) – fiction
- Ling Ma (United States) – fiction
- Susan Williams (United Kingdom) – nonfiction
- Darran Anderson (Ireland/United Kingdom) – nonfiction
- Dominique Morisseau (United States) – drama
- Jasmine Lee-Jones (United Kingdom) – drama
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs (United States) – poetry
- dg nanouk okpik (Iñupiaq-Inuit) – poetry
Michael Kelleher, Director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, said: “Reading this year’s recipients excited me because each one taught me new ways of seeing the past, the present, and the future. I can’t wait to see what each of them does next!”
For Fiction, the Prize has rewarded the prolific and multi-award-winning US writer Percival Everett, lauded for over thirty works of fiction and poetry filled with sharp observations about aesthetics, gender, politics, race, and sexuality – most recently the Booker nominated satirical horror, The Trees (2022). American novelist Ling Ma – who has been praised for staking out new and original ground in her debut novel Severance (2018) and subsequent short story collection Bliss Montage (2022) – has also been selected to receive a Windham-Campbell Prize.
The Windham-Campbell Prize 2023 selection committee - which remains anonymous - has given the following citations for Percival Everett and Ling Ma:
“In its mordant humor and philosophical skepticism, Percival Everett’s virtuosic body of work exemplifies fiction’s capacity for play, vigilance, and compassion for life’s precarity in an uncertain world.”
“Ling Ma meditates on urban anomie with wry humor and subversive imagination, brilliantly bending and blending genre to plumb the depths of her characters’ origins, displacement, and alienation.”
In Nonfiction, this year’s recipients hail from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Historian and writer Susan Williams, based in London, is celebrated for her academic analysis, archival research, and historical insight – combining to create powerful narratives exploring swaths of the past that have been concealed or neglected. Irish essayist, journalist, and memoirist Darran Anderson is recognised for his writing at the intersections of culture, politics, urbanism, and technology, including his dazzling debut Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between (2015), a hugely ambitious omnivorous analysis of real and imagined cities throughout history.
The Windham-Campbell Prize 2023 selection committee citations for Susan Williams and Darran Anderson are:
“Susan Williams chronicles imperial legacies with a forensic eye, a historical mind, and a decolonial sensibility for African agency; her findings are as stunning as they are transformative.”
“With divinatory attention, Darran Anderson gives voice to the testimony of objects and geographies, chronicling the passage of individual memory as it turns into a community's archive and sustaining myth.”
For Drama, a Windham-Campbell Prize has been awarded to Detroit’s TONY nominated Dominique Morisseau, whose much-acclaimed body of work includes plays The Detroit Project, Pipeline, Sunset Baby, Blood at the Root and Follow Me To Nellie’s, the Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations, and Showtime series Shameless. Alongside Morisseau, London’s trailblazing playwright Jasmine Lee-Jones – the youngest ever recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize, aged 24 – who exploded on the global theatre scene in 2019 with her debut play, seven methods of killing kylie jenner, is rewarded for her powerfully original storytelling and voice on contemporary culture.
The Windham-Campbell Prize 2023 selection committee citations for Dominique Morisseau and Jasmine Lee-Jones are:
“The nuanced characters and trenchant stories in Dominique Morisseau's plays strike at the heart of the most pressing conversations facing African Americans today, embodying a steadfast belief in the transformative power of love and art.”
“Fierce, fresh, and funny, Jasmine Lee-Jones’s iconoclastic plays reinvigorate the vernacular of contemporary theater for a new generation.”
In Poetry, the self-described “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs – is recognised with a Windham-Campbell Prize. An award-winning US activist, critic, poet, scholar and educator, Gumbs’ hybrid prose-poetry is grounded in a community building ethic and re-envisions old narratives to engage with the history of Black intellectual-imaginative work. dg nanouk okpik is the first Iñupiaq-Inuit writer to receive a Windham-Campbell Prize, for her astonishing achievement – including an American Book Award winning debut Corpse Whale (2012) and recent collection Blood Snow (2022) – and great promise.
The Windham-Campbell Prize 2023 selection committee citations for Alexis Pauline Gumbs and dg nanouk okpik are:
“The luminous, visionary poetry of Alexis Pauline Gumbs emerges from urgent realities of the present and haunting voices of the past to imagine alternative worlds shaped by radical listening, compassion, and love.”
“dg nanouk okpik’s lapidary poems sound the depths of language and landscape, shuttling between the ancient past and imperilled present of Inuit Alaska in a searching meditation on ecology and time.”
Previous UK recipients include Winsome Pinnock (Drama, 2022), Zaffar Kunial (Poetry, 2022) Kate Briggs (Nonfiction, 2021) Bhanu Kapil (Poetry, 2020), Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Fiction, 2018), Sarah Bakewell (Nonfiction, 2018), Edmund de Waal (Nonfiction, 2015), Nadeem Aslam (Fiction, United Kingdom/Pakistan 2014) and Tom McCarthy (Fiction, 2013) with further international recipients including Tsitsi Dangarembga (Fiction, Zimbabwe, 2022), Vivian Gornick (Nonfiction, United States, 2021), Raghu Karnad (Nonfiction, India, 2019), Cathy Park Hong (Poetry, United States, 2018), Erna Brodber (Fiction, Jamaica, 2017), C. E. Morgan (Fiction, United States, 2016), Helen Garner (Nonfiction, Australia, 2016), Helon Habila (Fiction, Nigeria, 2015), 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.
Percival Everett (United States)
Born in Fort Gordon, Georgia in 1956, Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and poetry. He is a recent finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (2021) and the recipient of many other accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (2022), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and two Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Awards (2010, 2001). Alchemist and trickster, magician and shapeshifter, Everett is our great chronicler of American unreality, all of his novels combining an idiosyncratic and finely-tuned literary sensibility with sharp observations about aesthetics, gender, politics, race, and sexuality. In works like The Trees (2022), a satirical horror novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Assumption (2011), a crime novel-Western hybrid, Everett’s restless intellect and invention are on full display. He skips across the literary trope-scape, plucking from the campus novel, the neo-noir, and the dream vision, producing fiction that is surprising, provoking, moving—and often very, very funny. Everett is currently Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, a position he has held since 2007. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.
“Excited is an understatement. I was shocked upon learning of the prize.” Percival Everett
Ling Ma (United States)
Ling Ma is the author of two books of fiction: the novel Severance (2018) and the short story collection Bliss Montage (2022), both New York Times Notable Books. Severance, which won a Young Lions Fiction Award (2019) and the Kirkus Prize (2018), presciently imagines the impact of a global pandemic on society while also examining the inner life of Candace Chen, a twentysomething office drone who works at a specialty Bible publisher and is one of the last survivors in New York City of a zombifying virus known as “Shen Fever.” A post-apocalyptic thriller and a Bildungsroman, a novel of social critique and a powerful examination of immigrant identity in America, Severance both recalls the fiction of Margaret Atwood and Don DeLillo and stakes out new and original ground. Bliss Montage displays similar adeptness, featuring variegated tales of isolation, uncannily moving between speculative and realist modes in order to offer a sharp investigation of capitalism, gender, diasporic experience, and the problems of embodiment. It received the Story Prize, and "Office Hours" from the collection was anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Collection Stories. She lives in Chicago with her family.
“It was very unexpected news on a very ordinary work day. I was taken aback.” Ling Ma
Nonfiction
Susan Williams (United Kingdom)
Susan Williams is a historian and writer based in London. Her work takes on what might best be described as secret histories: swaths of the past that have been concealed or neglected and for which much of the key documentary evidence has been destroyed, classified, or redacted. Williams descends into these archival labyrinths with assurance and composure, her sharply analytical mind producing comprehensible narratives out of oft-incomprehensible stories of Western imperialist and neo-colonial manoeuvrings, rapacity, and violence. Her primary focus is the interference of the Central Intelligence Agency in the sovereign affairs of African states. White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa (2021), her most recent work, moves between Congo and Ghana in the late 1950s and 1960s in order to describe “America’s role in the deliberate violation of democracy” in these newly independent states. In Spies in the Congo (2016), Williams takes the reader to a unique mine in the Katanga province, Shinkolobwe, whose deposits of uranium ore were commandeered for use in the Manhattan Project. In all of Williams’s work, including the critically-lauded Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa (2011), about the suspicious death in Zambia (then a British colony) of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, and Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation (2006), about the founding president of Botswana, she displays an impressive blend of academic analysis, archival research, and historical insight. Williams is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
“Such an unexpected joy! – a rare validation of the struggle to interrogate the global past and to search for truth. I am deeply grateful for this inspiration to push forward with renewed strength and resolve.” Susan Williams
Darran Anderson (Ireland/United Kingdom)
Darran Anderson is an Irish essayist, journalist, and memoirist. Over the past decade, he has written on the intersections of culture, politics, urbanism, and technology for a wide variety of publications, including The Atlantic, frieze magazine, The Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book, Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between (2015), is a hugely ambitious and dazzlingly omnivorous analysis of real and imagined cities throughout history. Chapter by chapter, in the style of Italo Calvino, Anderson takes us on an exhilarating tour of urban environments from the fantastical to the dystopian, delving into historical archives, travelogues, mythology, theme parks, science fiction, and video games. Inventory (2020), his second book and a finalist for the PEN Ackerley Award (2021), tells the story of Anderson’s working-class Catholic childhood in Derry, Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. Following Jorge Luis Borges and Georges Perec, Anderson investigates the past—his own, his family’s, and his city’s—through a series of vignettes, each centered on an object. A long-wave radio, a cassette tape, a floppy disk, a toy soldier: these objects, and Anderson’s sharply controlled examination of them, offer a meditation on the gifts and terrors of temporal experience. For Anderson, surviving the past, and surviving long enough to get a perspective on one’s place in it, is itself a triumph. “We’re actually beneath the great staggering scrap-pile of history,” he writes, “and we’re scrambling to get out.” Born in Derry, he now lives in London.
“My initial response was 'Holy ****! Is this real?' or, to put it more diplomatically, 'I'm surprised, grateful, and slightly dazed at this very welcome and generous news.” Darran Anderson
Drama
Dominique Morisseau (United States)
Over the past decade Dominique Morisseau has established herself as not only one of America’s preeminent dramatists but as a visionary force in the field of theater across the globe. Her body of work, including the hugely ambitious and critically acclaimed three-play cycle The Detroit Project (Skeleton Crew [2016], Paradise Blue [2015], and Detroit ’67 [2013]), is both deeply poetic and sharply philosophical, drawing upon the rich histories of Black American literature, music, and activism to create unflinching—and wildly entertaining—dramatic experiences. In the Detroit Project plays, as well as in standalone works like Confederates (2022), Pipe
“With all going on in the world, it is beyond joyous to learn that my work and voice matters and I'm being encouraged to continue on! As an artist, the ability to continue to make a living telling stories is vital to my growth and mission in life, and awards like these help to make a pathway for my creativity and passion to thrive. It's thrilling and inspiring!” Dominique Morisseau
Jasmine Lee-Jones (United Kingdom)
Jasmine Lee-Jones exploded onto the London theater scene in 2019 with her debut play, seven methods of killing kylie jenner. A sharply provocative, wildly funny story about a self-proclaimed Twitter activist, Cleo, and her best friend, Kara, the play follows the two friends as they negotiate their increasingly entangled offline and online identities, considering the complex and often discomfiting intersections of body image, colorism, cultural appropriation, and queerness in contemporary culture. Lee-Jones’s sophomore play, Curious (2021), picks up many of these same concerns. By turns zingy and tender, whimsical and furious, Curious excavates the racial politics of performance in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present. It is a powerfully original piece of storytelling and a moving meditation on desire, loneliness, and the invisibility of Black women, and particularly Black women artists, in history. Already widely recognized as a trailblazer and an important voice in global theater, Lee-Jones is the recipient of an Alfred Fagon Award (2019), a Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright (2019), and a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2019). She lives in London.
“I'm honestly still flabbergasted that the universe (and of course the Windham-Campbell Prizes) has made a path for me to forge my dreams on my own terms. Recently, I was feeling so disheartened by the seemingly countless amount of hurdles one is required to overcome to secure funding to pursue creative projects in this industry. Now facing the reality that I can pursue those dreams without any of those hurdles for a while, is not only affirming but also moving on a deeply spiritual level.” Jasmine Lee-Jones
Poetry
Alexis Pauline Gumbs (United States)
Born in Summit, New Jersey in 1982, Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an activist, critic, poet, scholar, and educator. A self-described “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist,” Gumbs uses hybrid forms to re-envision old narratives and engage with the history of Black intellectual-imaginative work. Her four books of prose-poetry include Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), Undrowned (2020), M Archive (2018), and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016). Dub, M Archive, and Spill form a kind of triptych, each engaging with the work of a crucial Black woman theorist: Sylvia Wynter in Dub; M. Jacqui Alexander in M Archive; and Hortense Spillers in Spill. In all her work, Gumbs raises the stakes of literature within and beyond the page. She is a people’s poet, awake to the form’s capacity to imagine alternative worlds, across and through time. Her worldview is capacious and paradigm-shifting, speaking to urgent realities with exuberant love, and inviting activists, artists, and readers alike to join in her participatory presentations. A graduate of Barnard College and Duke University, Gumbs is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2022), a Whiting Award (2022), and a National Humanities Center Fellowship (2020). She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is currently at work on a biography of Audre Lorde.
"I still keep asking myself if this is really happening. This means so much as an independent non-traditional artist. I feel like I'm being rewarded for trusting myself." Alexis Pauline Gumbs
dg nanouk okpik (Iñupiaq-Inuit)
dg nanouk okpik is an Iñupiaq-Inuit poet from south-central Alaska. Her debut collection of poetry, Corpse Whale (2012), received the American Book Award (2013). Since then, her work has been published in several anthologies, including New Poets of Native Nations (2018) and the forthcoming Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (2023). With her new collection Blood Snow, published in 2022 by Wave Books, okpik established herself as a poet of both great achievement and great promise, a cartographer of wildernesses without and within. Former United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo has described okpik’s work as “at once surprising and prophetic, ceremonial and disruptive.” Her poetry opens readers to a complex web of culture, ecology, and myth. In Blood Snow, okpik’s vision, while idiosyncratic and particular, is always also communal. No narwhal, no flower, no spore, no sunrise, no mosquito—not even a tooth emerging from the gum of a baby marmot—goes unnoticed. All these beings and objects are, she writes, “sung from my throat from a deep / place inside me.” okpik’s poetry offers the reader a way of thinking about our world that returns us to its gifts, its magic, and its sustaining beauty. The recipient of the May Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2022), okpik lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is a Lannan Foundation Fellow at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
“I’m as excited as a thousand marmots running in the tundra!” dg nanouk okpik
About 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 honours the spirit of their lives. www.windhamcampbell.org @WindhamCampbell
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