Jamaican-born author Kei Miller has been named one of the 2026 recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, one of the most significant and generous literary awards in the world.
Each winner receives $175,000, a prize designed to allow writers to focus fully on their creative work without financial constraints. The annual awards, which total $1.4 million this year, span fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, and have distributed more than $20 million since their launch in 2013.
Miller, who divides his time between Jamaica and the United States, is recognized in the nonfiction category alongside Belgian-born American writer Lucy Sante. Over the course of a career that began with poetry and short stories, Miller has expanded into nonfiction, exploring issues of race, sex, gender, and nation with a rare combination of intellect and lyricism. Drawing inspiration from literary figures such as Dionne Brand and James Baldwin, Miller’s work confronts what is often left unsaid, taking readers on a transformative journey across genres and forms. His prose and poetry have earned international acclaim for their inventiveness, emotional depth, and engagement with the cultural and social complexities of the Caribbean and the wider world.
Other 2026 recipients include Gwendoline Riley (United Kingdom) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs (United States) in fiction; Christina Anderson (United States) and S. Shakthidharan (Australia/Sri Lanka) in drama; and Joyelle McSweeney (United States) and Karen Solie (Canada) in poetry. Previous winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize include Sigrid Nunez, Hanif Abdurraqib, Dionne Brand, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Lorna Goodison, reflecting the prize’s international prestige and commitment to literary excellence.
The prizes were the vision of lifelong partners Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell, who sought to create an award that would spotlight literary achievement while freeing writers from financial worry. Administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the prizes are awarded to writers in the English language from around the globe, with judges remaining anonymous both before and after the announcement.
Miller is widely recognized for works that blend lyrical force with deep cultural insight. His 2014 poetry collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, which mixes Standard English with Jamaican Patois, won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection, one of the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious poetry honours.
His novel Augustown won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and its French translation earned the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout‑Monde. His short‑story collection Fear of Stones and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize early in his career. In 2021 his essays in Things I Have Withheld were shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction.
