Our most enthusiastic congratulations to poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo (Trinidad and Tobago/Scotland) for winning Yale University’s 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize. Eight authors of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama received this year’s international award in recognition of literary achievements or promise. The other 2025 recipients are Rana Dasgupta, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Anne Enright, Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, Sigrid Nunez, Patricia J. Williams, and Roy Williams. Congratulations to all the winners!
Poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and lives in the UK. One finds a sacred wonder and delight in language in every poem in each of their nine collections and eight chapbooks. In Utter’s (2013) titular poem, beauty is everywhere. The speaker says, “After all this hiding, no surprise / It’s like a thing in translation: / eggshell-shy. A thumb’s worth of glory, / nesting near the coastlines of your palm.” Capildeo’s poems have a sense of roaming curiosity: think of a determined and sensuous leap, rather than an automatic movement to get from A to B. It’s this rare quality that gives readers the sense that they are dancing alongside Capildeo when engaging with their poetry. Selected by The Guardian as among the best in recent poetry, Capildeo’s latest poetry collection, Polkadot Wounds (2024), finds the poet in conversation with beloveds, both living and passed. With an ear for timeless language, it’s no surprise to learn that Capildeo studied Old Norse and translation while earning their DPhil at Oxford University. The recipient of many awards including Forward Prize for Best Collection for Measures of Expatriation (2016) and the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship (2014), Capildeo is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. They are currently a professor and writer-in-residence at the University of York.
ANTHONY V. CAPILDEO said, “It’s the most wonderful thing to feel connected to people (living and dead) who cared so much for the freedom of creative expression as to found and administer this prize; it gives me courage, and also the means to be more consistently present to my communities. Winning the Windham-Campbell Prize has lifted weights that I didn’t even know were oppressing me internally; it’s beyond anything I looked for in my ordinary writer’s life. First it Knocked me Flat, but Now I’m Bouncing!”
For original post and related video, see https://windhamcampbell.org/festival/2025/recipients/capildeo-anthony-v
For more on the author, see https://www.peepaltreepress.com/blog/whappen/anthony-vahni-capildeo-wins-windham-campbell-prize and https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2025/quality/drama
Also see https://news.yale.edu/2025/03/24/eight-writers-awarded-yales-windham-campbell-prizes
[Photo above from York News.]
Our most enthusiastic congratulations to poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo (Trinidad and Tobago/Scotland) for winning Yale University’s 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize. Eight authors of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama received this year’s international award in recognition of literary achievements or promise. The other 2025 recipients are Rana Dasgupta, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Anne Enright, Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, Sigrid Nunez, Patricia J.
