Habila, Cole among nine Windham Campbell prize winners

The prize, awarded in secret, gives the authors unrestricted grants of $150, 000 to honour and support their works.The prize awarded in the category of fiction, non fiction and drama and is awarded for a body of work of extraordinary promise. It is administered by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in the US.The […]

The prize, awarded in secret, gives the authors unrestricted grants of $150, 000 to honour and support their works.
The prize awarded in the category of fiction, non fiction and drama and is awarded for a body of work of extraordinary promise. It is administered by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in the US.
The winners for 2015 in fiction are Teju Cole, Helon Habila, and Ivan Vladislavić (South Africa) while in nonfiction: Edmund de Waal, Geoff Dyer, (both from the UK) and John Jeremiah Sullivan (US) and for Drama Jackie Sibblies Drury (US), Helen Edmundson (UK), and Debbie Tucker Green (UK).
“The Windham Campbell Prizes were created by a writer to support other writers, said Michael Kelleher, director of the program. “Donald Windham recognized that the most significant gift he could give to another writer was time to write. In addition to the recognition prestige it confers, the prize gives them just that — with no strings attached.”
The prizes, which debuted in 2013, were established by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. There is no submission process and winners are determined by a global group of invited nominators, a jury in each category, and a selection committee.
Here is the profile of the Nigerian winners of the prize
Teju Cole is the author of two works of fiction that radically expand our understanding of diaspora and dislocation in the twenty-first century. Cole was born in the US to Nigerian parents, raised in Lagos, and currently resides in New York City, which serves as both setting and subject of Open City (2011). The novel, which documents the roaming thoughts and encounters of a Nigerian-German psychiatrist, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and earned Cole a PEN/Hemingway Award, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and frequent comparisons to W.G. Sebald.  In Every Day Is for the Thief, published in 2007 in Nigeria and in 2014 in the US, a dual American and Nigerian citizen travels from his home in New York to Lagos and finds himself a stranger. Every Day features original photographs by the author, and was named a Book of the Year by the New York Times,the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, and NPR.  Cole is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College, photography critic of theNew York Times Magazine, and is currently at work on a nonfiction book about contemporary Lagos.
Helon Habila is the author of three novels. He was Arts Editor of Nigeria’s Vanguard Newspaper when his short story “Love Poems” won the 2001 Caine Prize, garnering him international attention as one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary fiction.  The story was excerpted from his first novel, Waiting for an Angel (2002), itself about a Nigerian journalist’s literary ambitions threatened by a repressive military regime.  Waiting was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Africa Region).  That year Habila was also invited to serve as the first African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, and in 2006 he co-edited the British Council’s collection NW14: The Anthology of New Writing. His second novel Measuring Time (2007) won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction.  In 2011, he published his latest novel Oil on Water and edited The Granta Book of the African Short Story.  He is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University and returns to Nigeria each summer to teach a writing workshop.
In September, the winners will gather from around the world at Yale (where the Prizes are based), for an international literary festival celebrating their work. All events are free and open to the public