The RSL is incredibly proud that three of its Fellows have been honoured in this year’s Windham-Campbell Prizes, which celebrate eight writers across fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Each awardee receives $175,000 each, a sum that is intended to allow them the space and time to support their boldest, most vital work independent of financial concerns.
The 2025 cohort includes Anne Enright in fiction; Roy Williams in drama; and Anthony V. Capildeo in poetry.
We are prouder still that the internationally prolific Trinidadian-Scottish poet Anthony V. Capildeo – who was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, before moving to the UK – is also the guest editor of this year’s edition of Review, the RSL’s annual magazine. Anthony’s imagination and vision run throughout the magazine which features the writing of many more RSL Fellows including Polly Atkin, Jay Bernard, Bernardine Evaristo, Meena Kandasamy, A.L. Kennedy, Michael Rosen and Sunny Singh. RSL Fellows and members will receive a copy in the post – if you’d like to buy one, you can contact us via [email protected] to place your order.
Anthony’s acclaimed works including the Forward Prize-winning Utter and T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Measures of Expatriation. Their work has been praised for its complex and precise writing that deeply engages and captures the nuances of expatriation, identity and gender – as well as their playful attentiveness to form and language that holds a unique place in British poetry.
On receiving the Prize, Anthony said: “It’s the most wonderful thing to feel connected to people (living and dead) who cared so much for the freedom of creative expression as to found and administer this prize; it gives me courage, and also the means to be more consistently present to my communities. Winning the Windham-Campbell Prize has lifted weights that I didn’t even know were oppressing me internally; it’s beyond anything I looked for in my ordinary writer’s life. First it Knocked me Flat, but Now I’m Bouncing!”
The Windham-Campbell Prize 2025 selection committee – which remains anonymous – gave the following citation: “Anthony V. Capildeo’s poems are immersed equally in narrative and lyric, querying forms with an insistent playfulness and a radical political consciousness.”
Hailed as a master of her form, the first Laureate for Irish Fiction Anne Enright was recognized for her formidable collection of novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Gathering, through which she explores the theme of the family through startlingly potent and elegant domestic portraits, and deceptively simple language.
The Windham-Campbell Prize 2025 selection committee said: “In her wide-ranging and wryly unsentimental fiction, Anne Enright explores the limitations and joys of our human need for belonging.”
For drama, one of Britain’s most significant and prolific playwrights Roy Williams was rewarded for his undeniably essential oeuvre, through which he leverages an exquisite power of observation to create nuanced portrayals of race and class, today’s Britain, and how the simmering pressures of contemporary life can explode into unchecked hatred. The selection committee said: “Roy Williams’s nuanced, multivocal portrayals of race and class lay bare uncomfortable truths about British identity, creating an essential and complex theater of contemporary life.”
The full list of 2025 recipients are:
- Anne Enright (Ireland) – fiction
- Sigrid Nunez (United States) – fiction
- Patricia J. Williams (United States) – nonfiction
- Rana Dasgupta (United Kingdom) – nonfiction
- Roy Williams (United Kingdom) – drama
- Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (United Kingdom) – drama
- Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago) – poetry
- Tongo Eisen-Martin (United States) – poetry