Roy Williams on Dael Orlandersmith's YELLOWMAN

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