The eight recipients of the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prizes, among the world's most generous and prestigious literary prizes, will visit Yale next week for a four-day festival celebrating the written word.
The annual fall festival, which runs Sept. 15 through Sept. 18, will feature a keynote address by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Yiyun Li, a 2020 recipient of the Windham-Campbell prize for fiction, as well as conversations with the latest honorees on a broad range of subjects and readings of their work. All events are free and open to the public.
"It is an immense privilege to welcome the 2026 prize recipients to campus to share their work and perspectives with the Yale community," said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes. "We are excited to celebrate their literary achievements through a rich and inspiring program that showcases the craft of writing at its best."
The 2026 recipients, announced in April, are, in fiction, Gwendoline Riley (United Kingdom) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs (United States); in nonfiction, Lucy Sante (United States/Belgium) and Kei Miller (Jamaica); in drama, Christina Anderson (United States) and S. Shakthidharian (Australia/Sri Lanka); and in poetry, Joyelle McSweeney (United States) and Karen Solie (Canada).
The full schedule of the festival is available on the Windham-Campbell Prizes website.
Administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, part of the Yale Library, the Windham-Campbell Prizes are conferred annually to eight writers working in English anywhere in the world in recognition of their literary achievement or promise. Each recipient is awarded $175,000 to support their work.
This year's festival kicks off at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 15, with a welcome party under a tent on College Street at Cross Campus featuring music by DJ Edgewood and free refreshments served by local food trucks.
Barbara Rockenbach, the Stephen F. Gates University Librarian, will confer the prizes at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 16, during a ceremony in the lecture hall of the Yale Center for British Art, which is located at 1080 Chapel St. in New Haven.
After the conferral of the prizes, Li, the author of 12 books of fiction and nonfiction, including "Things in Nature Merely Grow," which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography will deliver a keynote lecture on the theme "Why I Write." Written especially for the occasion, Li's keynote will be the basis for the next installment of the prize's "Why I Write" series, published by Yale University Press.
Morning "wake up" sessions will be held daily at 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 17 and 18 underneath the College Street tent, offering free coffee and treats, giveaways, and short readings by prize recipients from their contributions to an upcoming issue of "The Yale Review," hosted by writer Clare Sestanovich and journalist James Surowiecki.
Events on Thursday, Sept. 17 include a conversation at noon at the College Street tent between poet and prize recipient Karen Solie and songwriter Mike Errico on the space where poetry and songwriting meet. At 1:30 p.m. under the tent, prize recipient and fiction writer Adam Ehrlich Sachs and historian of science Ivano Dal Prete, a senior lecturer in Yale's Department of History, will discuss the intersection of scientific inquiry, history, and narrative invention.
At 5:30 p.m. on that same day, at the Beinecke Library, prize recipient Kei Miller and Amanda Reid, assistant professor of theatre dance and performance studies, will explore the history, memory, and the radical origins of Caribbean Carnival, a cultural event celebrated annually across the Caribbean and the world. The event's title "Day of the Slave" references the historical roots of "Canboulay" - the precursor to modern Carnival that originated when enslaved people were forced to extinguish fires in the sugarcane fields.
On Friday, Sept. 18, architectural historian Elihu Rubin and prize recipient and poet Joyelle McSweeney will lead a walking tour of the New Haven Green. Rubin, the Henry Hart Rice Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Yale, will share the history and lore behind various points of interest while McSweeney will lead a series of specially designed writing prompts throughout the walk, which steps off from the College Street tent at 1:15 p.m.
Later that day, at 5:30 p.m., at the Beinecke Library, prize recipient and Tony-nominated playwright Christina Anderson will join Melissa Barton, curator of drama and prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, to discuss Anderson's process for adapting Zora Neale Hurston's "Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo'" for the stage.
The festival closes at 7 p.m. on Friday with the eight prize recipients reading selections of their work in the Yale University Art Gallery's lecture hall.
For the full schedule, visit the Windham-Campbell Prizes website.
