Yale University has announced the eight recipients of the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prizes, one of the world’s most significant international literary awards. The prizes were established in 2013 through a gift from writer Donald Windham in memory of Sandy Campbell, his partner of 40 years. Administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, part of Yale Library, they are conferred annually to writers working in English anywhere in the world in fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.
“The late Donald Windham established these prizes to call attention to literary achievement across writing disciplines and provide writers with the time, space, and freedom to work,” said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes.
Three of the eight award winners are American women with ties to the academic world. Each will receive $175,000 to support their work.
Christina Anderson is a playwright, screenwriter, and educator. A Tony-nominated writer for Outstanding Book of a Broadway musical, Anderson has taught playwriting at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Purchase College of the State University of New York, Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and the Yale School of Drama. She also served as the interim head of playwriting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. A native of Kansas, Anderson holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a master of fine arts degree in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.
Lucy Sante, a cultural critic, urban historian, and literary reporter, won a Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction. Born in Verviers, Belgium, she is the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), an examination of the city’s seedy side in the 1840-to-1920 period. She later published the highly acclaimed I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (Penguin Press, 2024). Sante taught at Columbia University and then at Bard College in New York for over two decades.
Joyelle McSweeney is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English and chair of the department of English at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She has authored five books of poetry, including her latest, Death Styles (Nightboat Books, 2024). Professor McSweeney is a graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in English and American literature. She holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Oxford in England and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing/poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop.