Three Caribbean Roots Writers Win 2019 Windham-Campbell Prize

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Mar. 15, 2019: Three Caribbean roots literary writers are among this year’s elite 8 winners of the 2019 Windham-Campbell Prize.

This year’s Windham-Campbell Prize Caribbean roots recipient in ﬁction is Trinidad-roots, Canadian David Chariandy and Jamaica-born Ishion Hutchinson and Jamaican roots Kwame Dawes for poetry.

Chariandy is the author of two novels and the epistolary non-ﬁction book I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter (2018). His latest fiction work, Brother tells the story of two siblings, Michael and Francis, and their early years in an impoverished district of Toronto.

Dawes is a critic, editor, and poet born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica. The author of twenty books of poetry and numerous other works of ﬁction and nonﬁction, Dawes is profoundly inﬂuenced by the aesthetic, intellectual, and political traditions of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections: House of Lords and Commons(2016) and Far District (2010). Since the publication of his debut, Hutchinson has received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), a National Book Critics Circle Award (2016), and a Whiting Award (2013).

This year, for the ﬁrst time, recipients were announced live from London at an event co-presented with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Stationers’ Hall and livestreamed at windhamcampbell.org.

Established in 2013 with a signiﬁcant gift from Donald Windham in memory of his partner of 40 years, Sandy Campbell, the Windham-Campbell Prizes are among the richest and most prestigious literary prizes on earth.