In the final episode of the 2025 season, Mike talks with 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction recipient Anne Enright about J.G. Farrell's 1970 novel, Troubles. Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three collections of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and eight novels, including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year and won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which won the Irish Novel of the year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Her work has been nominated for the Women’s Prize five times. From 2015 to 2018 she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest, The Wren, The Wren is the winner of the 2024 Writer's Prize for Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike talks with Rana Dasgupta, recipient of a 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction, about the pleasures of the 1958 novel The Leopard as well as its Visconti-directed film adaptation and how both projects reflect on our present tenuous moment. Born in Canterbury, United Kingdom, Rana Dasgupta has lived in the United States, India, and France. His work includes Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a collection of contemporary folktales, and a novel, Solo (2009), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2010). In 2014, he published his first nonfiction work, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. His clear-eyed observation of 21st-century crises lies at the heart of his highly anticipated forthcoming book, After Nations (2026), which explores the dissipation of the powers of the nation-state and seeks ways for us to navigate the resulting confusion. As an essayist, Dasgupta has contributed to distinguished outlets such as Harper’s, Granta, and The New Statesman. For several years, he taught a course on 21st-century culture and ideas at Brown University. His lectures on the nation-state, and the possibilities beyond it, have been hosted by the Berggruen Institute, the Serpentine Gallery, the House of World Cultures, and elsewhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anthony Vahni Capildeo was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and lives in the UK. One finds a sacred wonder and delight in language in every poem in each of their nine collections and eight chapbooks. Capildeo studied Old Norse and translation while earning their DPhil at Oxford University. The recipient of many awards including Forward Prize for Best Collection for Measures of Expatriation (2016) and the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship (2014), Capildeo is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. They are currently a professor and writer-in-residence at the University of York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Prize Director Michael Kelleher talks to 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama recipient Roy Williams about Dael Orlandersmith's 2002 play Yellowman. Roy Williams has written fifteen plays since The No Boys Cricket Club premiered at Theatre Stratford East in 1996. Williams’s many accolades include the Visionary Honours Award (2022), the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award (2011), the Alfred Fagon Award (2010 and 1997), the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2001), and a nomination for the Olivier Awards (2011). In addition to writing for the stage, Williams also writes for film, television, and radio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patricia J. Williams was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A longtime former “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” columnist for The Nation, Williams is also the author of six books of nonfiction including most recently The Miracle of the Black Leg. A MacArthur fellow (2000), Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School. She is currently a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini is the author of Muscovado, Little Miss Burden, and the Olivier-award-winning Sleepova. Ibini is the recipient of the Inevitable Foundation x Loreen Arbus Elevate Collective Award (2024), a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2023), and an Alfred Fagon Audience Award (2015), among other honors. They have written across a variety of mediums including children’s books, for the screen, and audio dramas for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, and Audible. Ibini lives in East London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike sits with Sigrid Nunez, recipient of a 2025 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, to discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and whether or not it really is "the Great American Novel." Sigrid Nunez is the author of ten books, including the National Book Award-winning novel The Friend (2018), which has been celebrated by the New York Times as one of the 100 best books of the 21st Century. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), a Berlin Prize Fellowship (2005), the Rome Prize in Literature (2001), and a Whiting Award (1993), Nunez has taught at Boston University, Columbia, the New School, and Princeton, among other institutions with esteemed literary programs, and now devotes herself to writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To kick off the new season of The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast, host and prize director Michael Kelleher is joined by Tongo Eisen-Martin, recipient of a 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, to discuss Ayi Kwei Armah's 1979 novel The Healers. Tongo Eisen-Martin was San Francisco’s eighth Poet Laureate (2021-2024). He is the author of three collections of poetry: Blood on the Fog (2021), selected by the New York Times as among the Best Poetry of 2021; Heaven is All Goodbyes (2017); and Someone’s Dead Already (2015). He has taught creative writing in prisons and is the author of We Charge Genocide Again, a series of lessons plans to support students and teachers in grappling with the state-sanctioned killing of Black people. A recipient of several awards including the American Book Award (2018), a California Book Award (2018), and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award (2018), Eisen-Martin earned both his BA and MA from Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the final episode of the 2025 Winter Season, Mike talks with Helen Green, winner of a 2016 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-fiction, about Henry Green's Party Going. They celebrate the joys of the NYRB Classics sale, the mysteries of Australian Rules football, and the joys of this ensemble novel. Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays, and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, and her diaries Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story. Her latest book is The Season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike chats with Dionne Brand, winner of a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, about the timely power of José Saramago's Seeing. READING LIST: Seeing by José Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costa • Blindness by José Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costa • Saramago's Nobel Lecture Dionne Brand is the award-winning author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her twelve books of poetry include Land to Light On; thirsty; Inventory; Ossuaries; The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos; and Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Her six works of fiction include At the Full and Change of the Moon; What We All Long For; Love Enough; and Theory. Her nonfiction work includes Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Brand is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, among them the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Toronto Book Award, the Trillium Book Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize, and the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She is the Editorial Director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, and University Professor Emerita at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto, Canada. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a co-production between The Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Hub. Music by Dani Lencioni, production by Drew Broussard, hosted by Michael Kelleher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike chats with Olivia Laing, winner of a 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, about the strange and confounding (and wonderful) pleasures of Charlotte Brontë's Villette. READING LIST: Villette by Charlotte Brontë • Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy • The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Olivia Laing is the author of several books of nonfiction and fiction including The Garden Against Time and the forthcoming The Silver Book. The Lonely City (2016) was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and has been translated into 14 languages. The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) was a finalist for both the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn PrizeLaing lives in Cambridge, England, and writes on art and culture for many publications, including The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The New York Times. Her debut novel Crudo was published by Picador and W. W. Norton & Company in June 2018. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a co-production between The Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Hub. Music by Dani Lencioni, production by Drew Broussard, hosted by Michael Kelleher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

André Alexis (winner of a 2017 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to kick off the 2025 winter season of the podcast with a vibrant discussion of Martha Baillie's memoir, There Is No Blue. TW: the book and this episode include discussion of suicide and abuse. Reading list:  There Is No Blue by Martha Baillie • The Search for Heinrich Schlögel by Martha Baillie • Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison • Finnegans Wake by James Joyce For a full episode transcript, click here. André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Pastoral (nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, and Lambton, Kent and Other Vistas: A Play. His new book, Other Worlds: Stories, is out from FSG in May. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kathryn Scanlan (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell's famous double-profile of New York fixture Joe Gould, the perils of running out of ideas, and the blurry line between fiction and reality. Reading list: Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell • "Joe Gould's Teeth" by Jill Lepore • Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney • Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell Kathryn Scanlan is the author of two novels (Aug 9—Fog and Kick the Latch) and one collection of short stories (The Dominant Animal). She won a 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and her work has appeared in Egress, Granta, and NOON, among other places, and her short story “The Old Mill” was selected by Michael Cunningham for the 2010 Iowa Review Fiction Prize. A graduate of the University of Iowa and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she currently lives in Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

m. nourbeSe philip (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about Kamau Brathwaite's tremendous collection, Born to Slow Horses, the lineage of Brathwaite's complex and playful work, and her own poetic connections to Brathwaite's writing. Reading list: Born to Slow Horses by Kamau Brathwaite • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys • The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon • The Tempest by William Shakespeare m. nourbeSe philip is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. Across her diverse and rich body of work, philip has constantly and deeply engaged with the complexities of art, colonialism, identity, and race, with a particular interest in forgotten and suppressed histories. Born in Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago in 1947, she is the recipient of many honors, including the Molson Prize (2021), the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature (2020), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), philip was educated at the University of the West Indies and earned graduate degrees in law and political science from the University of Western Ontario. Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies, including the Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English (2000) and International Feminist Fiction (1992), among others. She lives in Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sonya Kelly (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Drama) joins Michael Kelleher to admire and contemplate Jeremy Leggatt's translation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. They discuss film adaptations, writing emotions, keeping audiences happy, and more. Reading list: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, tr. by Jeremy Leggatt • The Hours by Michael Cunningham • Once Upon a Bridge by Sonya Kelly For a full episode transcript, click here.   Sonya Kelly is the author of five full-length plays, as well as numerous scripts for film, radio, and television. Once Upon a Bridge (2021) was a finalist for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Best New Play Award and Kelly’s work has been recognized with two Scotsman Fringe First Awards (2022, 2012) as well as the Stewart Parker Award (2018), a Writers' Guild of Ireland Award (2019) and the Dublin Fringe Award for Best Production (2014). A graduate of Trinity College, she lives in Dublin with her wife and daughter. Sonya is a member of The Dean Arts Studios, an organization dedicated to supporting artists from all over the world by providing rent-free space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jen Hadfield (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry) joins Michael Kelleher to wade through Annie Dillard's dense yet rewarding classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. They discuss difficult reading experiences, poetic attempts to unlock the ineffable and immense, the book's intense relationship to the natural world and how that has impacted Hadfield's own work, and more. Reading list: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard • Walden by Henry David Thoreau • Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield • "An Transparent Eyeball" by Ralph Waldo Emerson For a full episode transcript, click here. Jen Hadfield is a poet, bookmaker, and visual artist. She is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently The Stone Age. Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place (2008) received the T. S. Eliot Prize. Hadfield earned her BA from the University of Edinburgh and MLitt in creative writing from the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow. Her awards and honors include a Highland Books Prize (2022), an Edwin Morgan International Poetry Award (2012), the Dewar Award (2007) and an Eric Gregory Award (2003), as well as residencies with the Shetland Arts Trust and the Scottish Poetry Library. In 2014, she was named by the Poetry Book Society as one of twenty poets selected to represent the Next Generation of poets in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Hadfield currently lives in the Shetland Islands, where she is Reader in Residence at Shetland Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christina Sharpe (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to rave about 2018 Fiction prize-winner John Keene's Counternarratives. They discuss the pleasures of Keene's playful prose and his deep engagement with stirring questions of truth and history. Reading list:  Counternarratives by John Keene • Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain • James by Percival Everett • Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison • The Awakening by Kate Chopin For a full episode transcript, click here. Christina Sharpe is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada, as well as the author of three books of nonfiction: Ordinary Notes (2023), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010). Sharpe’s writing has also appeared in many artist catalogues and journals. Ordinary Notes was a Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. The winner of the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Sharpe lives in Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Chen (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Drama) joins Michael Kelleher to talk about the eternally fascinating Jorge Luis Borges story, ""Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Timelines slip, worlds collide, and Borges's lasting impact is felt. Reading list:  "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges • Italo Calvino • Rosicrucianism • Caught by Christopher Chen • Borges, Between History and Eternity by Hernán Díaz For a full episode transcript, click here. Christopher Chen is the author of more than a dozen formally innovative and politically provocative plays, including, most recently, The Headlands (2020) and Passage (2019). The recipient of a United States Artists USA Fellowship (2021), a Steinberg Playwright Award (2020), and an Obie Award for Playwriting (2017), among many other honors, Chen holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University. He lives in California. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deirdre Madden (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to talk about Marilynne Robinson's classic novel Housekeeping, siblings, writing with a density of language, and the unacknowledged humor present even in hard times. Reading list:  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville • Carl Jung • William Shakespeare • Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson For a full episode transcript, click here. Deirdre Madden is a writer from Toomebridge, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The author of eight acclaimed novels, she has twice been a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2009, 1996) and has received numerous other awards and honors, including the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame (2014), the Somerset Maugham Award (1989), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (1980). Madden holds a BA from Trinity College, Dublin and an MA from the University of East Anglia. She has been a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, since 1997, and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hanif Abdurraqib (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to discuss his love for Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, writing about cities, the importance of community, and more. Reading list:  The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor • Mama Day by Gloria Naylor • Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor • Your Blues Ain't Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell • The Easy Rawlins novels by Walter Mosley • Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan For a full episode transcript, click here. Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of three critically acclaimed books of nonfiction and five poetry collections. A writer of extraordinary depth, style, and range, Abdurraqib is a public intellectual in the truest sense of the term, combining discursive flexibility with a profound emotional and intellectual rigor. In both his essays and in books like A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (2021), Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (2019), and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), Abdurraqib moves through a wide range of subjects—Michael Jackson and moon walks, Sun Ra and NASA missions—incorporating the personal and the political with both joy and seeming effortlessness. He is the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction (2022), the Gordon Burn Prize (2021), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2021) among other honors. Abdurraqib is also the host of a weekly podcast called “Object of Sound” with Sonos Radio. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices