The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast The Windham-Campbell Prizes

Jen Hadfield (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry) joins Michael Kelleher to wade through Annie Dillard's dense yet rewarding classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. They discuss difficult reading experiences, poetic attempts to unlock the ineffable and immense, the book's intense relationship to the natural world and how that has impacted Hadfield's own work, and more.
Reading list:
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard • Walden by Henry David Thoreau • Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield • "An Transparent Eyeball" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Jen Hadfield is a poet, bookmaker, and visual artist. She is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently The Stone Age. Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place (2008) received the T. S. Eliot Prize. Hadfield earned her BA from the University of Edinburgh and MLitt in creative writing from the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow. Her awards and honors include a Highland Books Prize (2022), an Edwin Morgan International Poetry Award (2012), the Dewar Award (2007) and an Eric Gregory Award (2003), as well as residencies with the Shetland Arts Trust and the Scottish Poetry Library. In 2014, she was named by the Poetry Book Society as one of twenty poets selected to represent the Next Generation of poets in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Hadfield currently lives in the Shetland Islands, where she is Reader in Residence at Shetland Library.

Christina Sharpe (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to rave about 2018 Fiction prize-winner John Keene's Counternarratives. They discuss the pleasures of Keene's playful prose and his deep engagement with stirring questions of truth and history.
Reading list: 
Counternarratives by John Keene • Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain • James by Percival Everett • Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison • The Awakening by Kate Chopin
For a full episode transcript, click here.

Christina Sharpe is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada, as well as the author of three books of nonfiction: Ordinary Notes (2023), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010). Sharpe’s writing has also appeared in many artist catalogues and journals. Ordinary Notes was a Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. The winner of the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Sharpe lives in Toronto.

Christopher Chen (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Playwriting) joins Michael Kelleher to talk about the eternally fascinating Jorge Luis Borges story, ""Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Timelines slip, worlds collide, and Borges's lasting impact is felt.
Reading list: 
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges • Italo Calvino • Rosicrucianism • Caught by Christopher Chen • Borges, Between History and Eternity by Hernán Díaz
For a full episode transcript, click here.

Christopher Chen is the author of more than a dozen formally innovative and politically provocative plays, including, most recently, The Headlands (2020) and Passage (2019). The recipient of a United States Artists USA Fellowship (2021), a Steinberg Playwright Award (2020), and an Obie Award for Playwriting (2017), among many other honors, Chen holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University. He lives in California.
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.

Deirdre Madden (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to talk about Marilynne Robinson's classic novel Housekeeping, siblings, writing with a density of language, and the unacknowledged humor present even in hard times.
Reading list: 
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville • Carl Jung • William Shakespeare • Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
For a full episode transcript, click here.

Deirdre Madden is a writer from Toomebridge, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The author of eight acclaimed novels, she has twice been a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2009, 1996) and has received numerous other awards and honors, including the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame (2014), the Somerset Maugham Award (1989), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (1980). Madden holds a BA from Trinity College, Dublin and an MA from the University of East Anglia. She has been a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, since 1997, and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin.
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.

Hanif Abdurraqib (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to discuss his love for Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, writing about cities, the importance of community, and more.
Reading list: 
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor • Mama Day by Gloria Naylor • Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor • Your Blues Ain't Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell • The Easy Rawlins novels by Walter Mosley • Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan
For a full episode transcript, click here.


Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of three critically acclaimed books of nonfiction and five poetry collections. A writer of extraordinary depth, style, and range, Abdurraqib is a public intellectual in the truest sense of the term, combining discursive flexibility with a profound emotional and intellectual rigor. In both his essays and in books like A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (2021), Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (2019), and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), Abdurraqib moves through a wide range of subjects—Michael Jackson and moon walks, Sun Ra and NASA missions—incorporating the personal and the political with both joy and seeming effortlessness. He is the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction (2022), the Gordon Burn Prize (2021), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2021) among other honors. Abdurraqib is also the host of a weekly podcast called “Object of Sound” with Sonos Radio.
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.

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.