Jen Hadfield and Deirdre Madden awarded $175k Windham-Campbell Prizes

British poet Jen Hadfield and Irish novelist Deirdre Madden are among the recipients of this year’s $175,000 (£139,350) Windham-Campbell Prizes. Distributed from a $1.4m total prize pot (£1.1m), the prizes are awarded to eight writers to support their work and enable them to focus on their creative practice.  

Fiction writer Kathryn Scanlan, winner of this year’s Gordon Burn Prize, and non-fiction authors Christina Sharpe and Hanif Abdurraqib have also been awarded prizes this year, alongside playwrights Sonya Kelly and Christopher Chen, and poet M NourbeSe Philip.

The prizes are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the recipients are selected by an anonymous committee. 

“Each year I feel honoured to call the eight recipients: to be the messenger delivering the entirely unexpected and life-changing news that they have been awarded $175,000," said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes. "It is clear – now, more than ever – how challenging working in the creative industries, around the world, can be. A Windham Campbell Prize is intended to offer financial security and, through this freedom, the time and space to write, to think, to create – all without pressure or expectation.”

For fiction, the prize has recognised Ireland’s Madden, who has written 12 novels, including Molly Fox’s Birthday (Faber), and American novelist Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch (Daunt Books).

The selection committee praised Madden’s novels for "portraying the intricacies of human lives with compassion and effortless depth". Of Scanlan’s work, they said it "fuses mundane experiences with the density of a redemptive vision, capturing the harrowing events of ordinary lives in raw, hard-hitting prose".

In non-fiction, American academic Sharpe is celebrated for her "incisive, multi-layered work", selected for the prize alongside American writer Abdurraqib – celebrated for turning a "poet’s gaze toward cultural archives". In drama, San Francisco-born playwright Chen is honoured for his portfolio of plays that upend "expectations of drama and form", while Ireland’s Kelly has been rewarded for works that "sparkle with the quirkiness of the everyday".

Finally, in poetry, Trinidad and Tobago’s poet, novelist, playwright and essayist Philip has been selected for her "genre-obliterating poetry", and the UK’s Hadfield is among the winners for her "intricate poems [that] slow down time". Hadfield has been published by both Picador and Bloodaxe and won the T S Eliot Prize in 2009.

With the total prize money awarded over the past decade at over $18m (£14.3m), the award is one of the most significant prizes globally. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Edmund de Waal and Pankaj Mishra have all been previous winners.