Williams and Anderson among Windham-Campbell winners

The Windham-Campbell Prize winners for 2023 have been announced, with British historian Susan Williams and Irish essayist Darran Anderson taking the awards for non-fiction.

Each of the eight recipients receives a $175,000 (£140,000) prize to support their writing and allow them to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. The figure represents a $10,000 increase on previous years. 

Williams, who is based in London, published White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa (C Hurst & Co Publishers) in 2021, which 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 the newly independent states. The anonymous judging panel said of her work: “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.”

Anderson, meanwhile, is recognised for his writing at the intersections of culture, politics, urbanism, and technology, including his 2015 debut Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between (University of Chicago Press), which analyses real and imagined cities throughout history.

US writers Percival Everett and Ling Ma triumphed in the fiction category. Everett has published more than 30 works of fiction and poetry – most recently the Booker-nominated satirical horror The Trees (Influx Press). Meanwhile Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance (Text Publishing) won the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Kirkus Prize.

For drama, the US-based Dominique Morisseau – whose body of work includes plays "The Detroit Project", "Pipeline" and "Sunset Baby" – received an award, as did 24-year-old Jasmine Lee Jones. Based in London, Jones becomes the youngest ever recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize and is best known for her 2019 play "seven methods of killing kylie jenner".

In Poetry, the self-described “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs – is recognised with a Windham-Campbell Prize. Joining her is dg nanouk okpik as the first Iñupiaq-Inuit writer to receive a Windham-Campbell Prize. She has published collections including Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press) and, more recently, Blood Snow (Wave Books).

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!”

The first prizes were announced in 2013, the brainchild of lifelong partners Donald Windham and Sandy M Campbell (the latter of whom passed away in 1988). Since then, it has distributed almost $16m in prizes. The awards are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.