Gwendoline Riley Wins $175K Windham-Campbell Prize
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- Gwendoline Riley wins the $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize in fiction, celebrated for novels exploring fractured relationships and women's interior lives, including the Women's Prize-shortlisted First Love and My Phantoms
- S Shakthidharan (Shakthi) receives the $175,000 drama prize for Counting and Cracking, a 2019 multigenerational epic tracing 20th-century Sri Lanka that previously won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature
- Lucy Sante is awarded in nonfiction for her 2024 memoir I Heard Her Call My Name, documenting her transition late in life
- Adam Ehrlich Sachs takes the fiction prize, with judges praising his 'bravura exploration of the history of knowledge' across three books including The Organs of Sense
- Joyelle McSweeney and Karen Solie win in poetry, while Kei Miller joins Sante in nonfiction and Christina Anderson takes the second drama prize, bringing the total to eight recipients and $1.4 million
- Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, said the grants give writers 'the time, space and creative freedom to think, write and nurture their talent' at a moment when the arts are 'facing more challenges now than ever before'
- Past recipients of the prize include Percival Everett, Olivia Laing, Tessa Hadley, Anne Enright, Edmund de Waal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Teju Cole, and Pankaj Mishra
Why it matters: The $175,000 unrestricted grants give eight writers financial freedom to create without commercial pressure — significant validation for Riley after her Women's Prize shortlisting and for Shakthi whose *Counting and Cracking* already swept Australian literary awards. The $1.4M annual outlay reinforces the prize's role sustaining literary work as director Kelleher warned the arts face 'more challenges now than ever before.'
