The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast The Windham-Campbell Prizes

Tessa Hadley (winner of a 2016 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher for the final episode of this winter mini-season to talk about Ivan Turgenev's First Love, translated by Isaiah Berlin.
Reading list: 
First Love by Ivan Turgenev, tr. by Isaiah Berlin • The Odyssey by Homer • "A Nest of Gentlefolk" by Ivan Turgenev • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Tessa Hadley is the author of three previous collections of stories and eight novels. She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and has been a finalist for the Story Prize. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She lives in Cardiff, Wales.
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.

John Keene (winner of a 2018 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, the joys of a shaggy dog story, the power of the sublime, and the limits of knowledge.
Reading list: 
The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, tr. by Laura Vergnaud • Blackouts by Justin Torres • Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem • Roberto Bolaño • Clarice Lispector

John Keene is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His latest book, Punks: New and Selected Poems, won the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene is the recipient of many awards and fellowships—including the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Whiting Foundation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the American Book Award. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (winner of a 2016 Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama) chats with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about British theater legend Caryl Churchill's Far Away, the power of language on the page and stage, and the point of having a playwright at all.
Reading list: 
Far Away by Caryl Churchill • Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill • Top Girls by Caryl Churchill • Prince • Jasmine Lee Jones on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun • Cristina and Her Double: Essays by Herta Müller

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright whose plays include Girls, Everybody (Pulitzer Prize finalist), War, Gloria (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Appropriate (OBIE Award), An Octoroon (OBIE Award), and Neighbors. A Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre, recent honors include the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright from the London Evening Standard, a London Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwriting, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Steinberg Playwriting Award, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. Jacobs-Jenkins has taught at Yale, NYU, Juilliard, Hunter College, and the University of Texas-Austin.
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.

Yiyun Li (winner of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction) chats with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about French Catholic monarchist author Georges Bernanos's Mouchette, the joys of reading together, and why inarticulate characters often live the deepest lives.
Reading list: 
Mouchette by Georges Bernanos, tr. by J.C. Whitehouse • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy • Tolstoy Together • Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday's Child, The Book of Goose, Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life as well as the book Tolstoy Together. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.
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.

Percival Everett (winner of a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Windham-Campbell Prize administrator Michael Kelleher for the last interview of the season, and it's a joyful exploration of Ralph Ellison's seminal novel Invisible Man, Everett's relationship to the book and its contemporaries, and the enduring power of a novel that makes you think.

Reading list: 
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison • Moby Dick by Herman Melville • "Box Seat" by Jean Toomer • If He Hollers, Let Him Go by Chester Himes • Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes • Native Son by Richard Wright • "(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue" by Louis Armstrong • The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler • Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Percival Everett’s most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award) The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has a poetry collection forthcoming with Red Hen Press. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC.
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.

Jasmine Lee-Jones (winner of a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama) joins Windham-Campbell Prize administrator Michael Kelleher for a wide-ranging conversation about the incredible power of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, linking the work of Hansberry and Jordan Peele, and the power of dreams.
Reading List:


A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

August Wilson's Century Cycle


Get Out by Jordan Peele


Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson

"A Love Supreme" by John Coltrane


Beneatha's Place by Kwame Kwei-Armah


Jasmine Lee-Jones is a writer and performer. Jasmine was a writer-on-attachment for the 2016 Open Court Festival, and was further developed as a writer through the Royal Court’s Young Court programme. Her first play seven methods of killing kylie jenner (2019) was first commissioned as part of The Andrea Project and opened at the Royal Court in July 2019. In 2023, she became the youngest ever recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize.