The novelist says she couldn’t accept the award after being told it would entail ‘extensive promotion’
US writer Helen DeWitt has spoken out after being chosen as one of the original eight recipients of this year’s Windham-Campbell writing prizes, worth $175,000 (£130,000) each, but ultimately having to turn down the award because she was unable to participate in the promotional activities that the prize requires.
In a blog and a series of posts on X, the cult author of books including The Last Samurai said that she had been told she had won the award in February, but that receiving the money was “contingent on extensive promotion”, including participating in a festival, a podcast and a six- to eight-hour filming session for a promotional video.
At the time, DeWitt was “close to breakdown” after a series of professional and personal difficulties, she explained. “If you’re trying not to crack up, there are some things you can’t do; it’s hard to get people to accept that,” she wrote in a blog posted the day the winners of this year’s awards were announced.
Learning of the publicity requirements, she wrote that it was “impossible to imagine Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy, in early career, contemplating this with anything but horror”. She added: “If I had eight months clear before the festival I might be able to go to that, but how can I drop everything now, when I had finally cleared time to write after five very bad years?”
