Canadian author David Chariandy wins US$165K Windham-Campbell Prize

Canadian author David Chariandy has won US$165,000 as one of eight recipients of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize.

Billed as one of the world’s richest literature prizes, the unrestricted grant is awarded to poets and writers of fiction, non-fiction and drama to support their literary pursuits.

Chariandy won the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2017 for his second novel, “Brother,” about two sons of Trinidadian immigrants who confront violence and prejudice in a Toronto housing complex.

Windham-Campbell judges praised the Vancouver-based author’s eye for details that lay bare “the revelations of grief as well as the intimacies found within fraught and fraying social spaces.”

The other fiction winner this year was Irish short story writer Danielle McLaughlin.

In drama, the recipients were Australian Patricia Cornelius and Korean-American Young Jean Lee.

Ishion Hutchinson of Jamaica and Ghana-born Kwame Dawes won for poetry, while Indian author Raghu Karnad and American essayist Rebecca Solnit were honoured for non-fiction.

The prize was established in 2013 and named for the late novelist Donald Windham and his longtime partner Sandy M. Campbell.