Three of the eight winners of this year’s Windham-Campbell Prizes are Canadian writers: m. nourbeSe philip, Christina Sharpe, and Jen Hadfield.

The annual Windham-Campbell Prizes, administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, recognize eight writers for literary achievement, two each in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

This year both poetry prizes went to Canadians. Tobago-born and Toronto-based m. nourbeSe philip is an internationally recognized poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. Her work includes the poem Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng.

Jen Hadfield is a Shetland-based poet, bookmaker, and visual artist. Her second collection Nigh-No-Place explores her Canadian citizenship and her epic round trips around the country.

Christina Sharpe, who won for nonfiction, is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. Her most recent book, Ordinary Notes, won the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Each winner receives $175,000 (U.S.). One of the richest English-language literary prizes in the world, the Windham-Campbell Prizes were created to free writers from financial concerns in order to focus on their work. Recipients can live anywhere in the world but must write in the English language. The judges for the prize remain anonymous.

The other 2024 winners are: for fiction, Deirdre Madden (Ireland) and Kathryn Scanlan (U.S.); for nonfiction, Hanif Abdurraqib (U.S.); and for drama, Christopher Chen (U.S.) and Sonya Kelly (Ireland).

Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin were awarded Windham-Campbell Prizes in 2021. Previous Canadian winners include David Chariandy, Lorna Goodison, André Alexis, Hannah Moscovitch, and John Vaillant.