Irish playwright Marina Carr has won one of the world’s most lucrative literary honours, the Windham-Campbell Prize, worth $165,000 (€155,00犀利士
0).
The Windham-Campbell prizes, administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, were established in 2013 with a gift from the late Donald Windham in memory of his partner of 40 years, Sandy M Campbell. They recognise exceptional writers of fiction, non-fiction and drama who write in English. Prize recipients are nominated confidentially and judged anonymously. The call that Prize recipients receive from program director Michael Kelleher is the first time that they have learned of their consideration.
Carr, whose adaptation of Anna Karenina premiered to great acclaim at the Abbey Theatre in December 2016, is a lecturer in Dublin City University’s School of English. She is working on new plays for the Abbey and the Tricycle Theatre in London, the latter about Clytemnestra in the aftermath of the Trojan war.
Other recipients of this year’s Windham-Campbell Prize are: in fiction, André Alexis and Erna Brodber; in nonfiction, Maya Jasanoff and Ashleigh Young; in poetry, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Carolyn Forché; and in drama, Ike Holter.