Awarded to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, other recipients include S Shakthidharan, Adam Ehrlich Sachs and Kei Miller
British novelist Gwendoline Riley is among eight writers set to receive $175,000 (£130,000) each in recognition of their life’s work.
Australian playwright S Shakthidharan, known as Shakthi, is also among those selected for this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes, which award $1.4m annually to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, with the aim of enabling them to focus on their work free from financial pressures.
Riley is celebrated for her oeuvre of short novels that explore fractured relationships, family tensions and the interior lives of women, including First Love, which was shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction, and My Phantoms. “This is very hard for me to take in,” Riley said. “I am more grateful than I can say. This unimagined vote of confidence will not go wasted on me.”
“Riley’s work recasts our relationship with the familiar, transforming ordinary, unremarkable lives of her characters into something startling and new,” wrote Clare Clark in a review of Riley’s latest novel, The Palm House. “She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with the vertiginous lurch of despair.”
