Percival Everett and Ling Ma, already two of the year's most honored writers, are among eight winners of the lucrative Windham-Campbell Prize. Each of the recipients, who also include the dramatists Dominique Morisseau and Jasmine Lee-Jones, will be given $175,000.
Over the last few weeks, Everett has been voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, won the PEN/Jean Stein Award for his novel “Dr. No” and was a National Book Critics Circle awards fiction finalist. Ma, whose story collection “Bliss Montage” won the book critics fiction prize, is also this year's winner of the Story Prize for best short fiction.
The prizes were first thought of in the 1980s by author Donald Windham and actor-writer Sandy M. Campbell and formally established a decade ago to “call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.” The other winners announced Tuesday by Yale University, where the awards are administered, are the nonfiction writers Susan Williams and Darran Anderson and the poets Alexis Pauline Gumbs and dg nanouk okpik.
Previous winners include James Salter, Yiyun Li and Suzan-Lori Parks.
