Guardian Australia
Renowned for her darkly funny novels exploring failed relationships, the writer has been awarded the Windham‑Campbell prize for a body of work. She explains why it will change her life – if not her outlook It’s possible that she might be feeling more tolerant of straitened circumstances because her work has just received significant critical – and material – recognition in the shape of a Windham-Campbell prize. These awards are the antithesis of many other hoopla-heavy literary prizes: each year, eight writers across fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry are given $175,000 (£135,000) to allow them to work with financial ease and security; previous winners include Anne Enright, Margo Jefferson and Yiyun Li. An anonymous jury selects the recipients from a pool of nominations – nominators and their choices also remain undisclosed, with the criteria being excellence across a body of work – and, aside from a select number of events, there’s little of the media circus about the whole affair. They are, quite simply, a boon to writers without obvious additional means, who are all operating in an increasingly challenging marketplace. What did it feel like to be selected? “Unimaginable. It was just an ordinary, wet Wednesday, and I had an email through. I hadn’t heard of it, but then I did remember seeing Anne Enright getting it, because I remember some of the language she used to describe what it was like to get exactly this kind of call. And then I came up with the phrase ‘Deus Ex Cashmachina’, which I think would work better on the page than when you say it out loud. And then I felt completely overwhelmed. I think they filmed me crying.” Continue reading...
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