By Tadeniawo Collins
According to Washington Post, the awards were established in 2013 at Yale University by writer, Donald Windham and are given in three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Drama.
With the prize honouring writers anywhere in the world writing in English and nominations confidential; writers don’t even know they’re being considered until they get a special e-mail notifying them of their success.
A professor of creative writing at George Mason University, Helon got the mail marked ‘urgent’ and himself and his wife feared it was a scam. But when they Googled the sender, ‘Windham Campbell’, they discovered it was, in fact, a real prize worth $150k.
‘I was in a daze,’ Habila says. ‘I haven’t made a plan yet. But I guess the idea of the prize is to give a writer freedom from financial constraints so he or she can work on a book. I hope to do just that, to honour the vision of Windham and Campbell, who were actual writers and who understood how tough it is for writers to be free to work on just what they want to work on.’
Habila knows that financial challenges aren’t the only constraints writers face. He grew up during a particularly tumultuous time in Nigeria, where freedom of expression was often violently curtailed. Nevertheless, he began writing poems and short stories, and by the early 2000s, he was attracting national attention.
‘I find myself drawn to subjects of justice and injustice, power and powerlessness,’ he says. ‘I tend to focus on ordinary individuals and their capacity to be complex and even heroic, to rise above the limits and expectations set for them by society.’
In 2007, W.W. Norton published Habila’s second novel, Measuring Time, and in 2011 he served as editor of The Granta Book of the African Short Story.
The other winners of this year’s Windham Campbell prizes in Fiction are Teju Cole (another Nigerian) and Ivan Vladislavić (South Africa). In Non-Fiction the winners are Edmund de Waal (U.K.), Geoff Dyer (U.K.) and John Jeremiah Sullivan (U.S.). In Drama, the winners are Jackie Sibblies Drury (U.S.), Helen Edmundson (U.K.) and Debbie Tucker Green (U.K.).
In September 2015, this year’s winners will receive their awards at a free public ceremony at Yale.
