On April 8, 2026, Yale University announced the eight recipients of the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prizes, “one of the world’s most significant international literary awards.” Each awardee will receive $175,000 to support their work. One of these winners was Jamaican writer Kei Miller. Our warmest congratulations!
The Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes call attention to literary achievement and provide writers the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. See post below; for more information, visit Yale News and Windham-Campbell Prizes.
Kei Miller (Nonfiction, 2026, Jamaica)
Kei Miller’s lyrical and trenchant essays hold a range of writerly selves and reveal deep and unsettling truths about the limits of language and the raced and gendered body moving through the world.
The author of eleven books, Kei Miller lives between the United States and Jamaica, where he was born. Miller burst onto the literary scene as a writer of poems and short stories before turning his formidable talents to nonfiction. In 2018, he was admitted as one of “40 Under 40” into the Royal Society of Literature, a fellowship that highlights the United Kingdom’s next generation of bold voices. Things I Have Withheld (2021), Miller’s latest essay collection, explores the body, or as Miller puts it, “these soft houses in which we live and in which we move and from which we can never migrate, except by dying.” This stunning tour de force was a finalist for numerous prizes including the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize and earned Miller his second OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Nonfiction. Drawing on the intellectual lineages of Dionne Brand and James Baldwin, Miller gives voice to what is often left unsaid when it comes to race, sex, gender, and nation.
Moving with grace across the overgrown terrain of the unsayable, Miller’s variegated oeuvre takes readers on a transformative journey through form and genre. Through his devotion to language’s potential to construct and reconstruct our humanity, Miller hopes we will arrive at a place of “respect; which is to say, dignity; which is to say, love.” Miller earned an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. He is currently a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami in Florida.
For more information, see https://news.yale.edu/2026/04/08/eight-writers-awarded-yales-windham-campbell-literature-prizes and (with a video of the author) https://windhamcampbell.org/recipients/miller-kei
Also see https://www.facebook.com/WindhamCampbellPrizes
On April 8, 2026, Yale University announced the eight recipients of the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prizes, “one of the world’s most significant international literary awards.” Each awardee will receive $175,000 to support their work. One of these winners was Jamaican writer Kei Miller. Our warmest congratulations! The Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes call attention to literary