The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has announced the eight winners of this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes in the fields of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Each winner will receive a $165,000 prize and will be honored at an international literary festival in New Haven in September.
Two of the eight winners this year are women who teach at major American universities.
Maya Jasanoff is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. She is the author of Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) and Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). Her latest work, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, is scheduled to be published by Penguin Press in November.
Professor Jasanoff is a graduate of Harvard University. She earned a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge in England and a Ph.D. at Yale University.
Carolyn Forché is a professor of English and the director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. After being informed that she won a Windham-Campbell prize, Professor Forché said, “I’m elated at the wonderful and most unexpected news of this prize, with its blessing of freedom and time, and the recognition that what I have set to paper has worth, not only for itself but for the world. I’m filled with gratitude, and most especially moved by the founders’ compassion toward their fellow writers. Thank you. My writerly solitude is now full of light.”
Professor Forché is the author of several books of poetry including Blue Hour (Harper, 2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a graduate of Michigan State University and holds a master of fine arts degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.