Gwendoline Riley and Karen Solie among recipients of the Windham-Campbell prizes

Gwendoline Riley and Karen Solie are among eight recipients of the £130k Windham-Campbell prizes, for fiction and poetry, respectively. The American literary prizes, administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, recognise achievement across fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama

Riley, the author of seven novels including First Love (Granta, 2017), My Phantoms (Granta, 2022) and The Palm House (Picador, 2026), was cited by the anonymous selection committee as a writer whose "incisive novels lay bare the cruelties and complicities of intimacy in prose that is at once meticulous and ruthless". 

“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.”

Canadian poet Karen Solie, author of six books of poetry including the T.S. Eliot Prize winning collection Wellwater (Picador, 2025), receives the poetry prize for a body of work that explores desire, loss and environmental damage. The anonymous selection committee said of her work “through precise, profound, and wry plainspeaking verse, Karen Solie locates and interrogates the human apprehension of the world of things.”