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This year’s winners of the Windham-Campbell Prizes have been announced, with Zimbabwean writers Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions, Faber) and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (The Theory of Flight, Catalyst Press) taking home the awards for fiction.
Each recipient is awarded an unrestricted grant of $165,000 to support their writing and allow them to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.
Dangarembga is a multi-award-winning novelist, playwright, filmmaker and activist whose debut novel, Nervous Conditions, was the first book by a black woman from Zimbabwe to be published in English. It was named by the BBC as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world.
In September 2020—the same week that her novel This Mournable Body (Faber) was nominated for the Booker Prize—Dangarembga was arrested during peaceful anti-corruption protests in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare and charged with intention to incite public violence. She remains there on remand.
Ndlovu was awarded the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize for The Theory of Flight.
Pulitzer prize-winning author Margo Jefferson received one of the two non-fiction prizes for her critically acclaimed biography, On Michael Jackson (Granta), and National Book Critics Circle Award winning memoir Negroland (Pantheon).
The second of the prizes went to Emmanuel Iduma, essayist, novelist, photographer and art critic, for his work, A Stranger’s Pose (Cassava Republic Press), which traces his travels around Africa.
The two poets awarded in that category were Zaffar Kunial, whose collection, Us (Faber & Faber), was nominated for both the Costa Poetry Award and TS Eliot Prize, and Wong May, whose latest work, In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for Our Century, was published in January 2022 by Carcanet Classics.
For drama, Winsome Pinnock—playwright, dramatur, and the first black British female writer to have a play produced by the Royal National Theatre—has been recognised as well as Sharon Bridgforth, celebrated for her abstract theatrical jazz and performance literature.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the awards, which were set up by partners Donald Windham and Sandy M Campbell to recognise each year eight writers for literary achievement at every stage of their careers. Mike Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, said: “Across 10 extraordinary years, the Windham-Campbell Prizes have celebrated exceptional literary achievement and nurtured great talent by giving the precious gifts of time, space and creative freedom. We are proud to mark our 10th anniversary with the most exciting list of recipients yet. Led by a trailblazing group of global women’s voices, these writers’ ambitious, skilful, and moving work bridges the distance between the history of nations and a deeply personal sense of self.”