Eight Writers Awarded $150,000 Yale Prize
Posted on March 16, 2014
Eight writers from around the world won the Windham Campbell Literature Prizes. Each writer will receive $150,000. The winners will receive their prizes at a ceremony and literary festival at Yale in September. The writers did not know they had been nominated so they were quite shocked to learn they won the lucrative prize.
British playwright Sam Holcroft won in the drama category. She told Yale News, "I'm stunned, overwhelmed - and frankly, slightly unhinged - to be named as a recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize. Realizing that I can put away the applications for temping jobs, and devote all my time to writing - it's genuinely life-changing, and I'm indescribably grateful."
Aminatta Forna, a Sierra Leonean novelist based in the United Kingdom, won one of the fiction prizes. She says, "The Windham Campbell Prize offers a writer what we most crave - time to write, free from deadlines, financial pressures, the expectations of others. It is a wonderful idea, a gesture of remarkable generosity, and in the current climate - when the pursuit of fiction faces so many challenges - very welcome indeed."
Here is the complete list of prizewinners:
Fiction
- Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone)
- Nadeem Aslam (Pakistan)
- Jim Crace (United Kingdom)
- Pankaj Mishra (India)
- John Vaillant (United States/Canada)
- Kia Corthron (United States)
- Sam Holcroft (United Kingdom)
- Noelle Janaczewska (Australia)