Writer Rana Dasgupta wins $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize

Yale University has announced the eight recipients of the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prizes. The recipients, honoured for their literary achievement or promise, will each receive $175,000 to support their work.

Rana Dasgupta, a British author of Indian origin, has been awarded the Prize for his nonfiction. The citation states that the prize has been awarded to him “in recognition of his perceptive critique of global hypercapitalism, industrialisation, politics and class, as seen in his Orwell Prize and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize shortlisted book Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi.”

The other recipients are, in fiction, Sigrid Nunez (United States) and Anne Enright (Ireland); in nonfiction, Patricia J Williams; in drama, Roy Williams (United Kingdom) and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (United Kingdom); and in poetry, Anthony V Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago) and Tongo Eisen-Martin (United States).

Dasgupta’s 2014 book, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (Canongate Books, HarperCollins India), offers a portrait of India’s capital city through a combination of reporting and oral history. It examines the dizzying transformation it underwent at the turn of the 21st century. His forthcoming book, After Nations, explores the “generalised state of crisis” afflicting the nation-state worldwide.

Dasgupta is also the author of the novels Tokyo Cancelled, and Solo. He was the founding director of the JCB Prize for Literature in India.

The prizes were established in 2013 by writer Donald Windham in...

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