To kick off our Winter Mini-season for 2026, Geoff Dyer (recipient of a 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction) joins Prize Director Michael Kelleher for a conversation about Xiaolu Guo's riotous and moving A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.

Geoff Dyer is the author, most recently, of Homework: A Memoir as well as four novels and many other non-fiction works. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ’s Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

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In the final episode of the 2025 season, Mike talks with 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction recipient Anne Enright about J.G. Farrell's 1970 novel, Troubles.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three collections of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and eight novels, including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year and won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which won the Irish Novel of the year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Her work has been nominated for the Women’s Prize five times. From 2015 to 2018 she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest, The Wren, The Wren is the winner of the 2024 Writer's Prize for Fiction.

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Mike talks with Rana Dasgupta, recipient of a 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction, about the pleasures of the 1958 novel The Leopard as well as its Visconti-directed film adaptation and how both projects reflect on our present tenuous moment.

Born in Canterbury, United Kingdom, Rana Dasgupta has lived in the United States, India, and France. His work includes Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a collection of contemporary folktales, and a novel, Solo (2009), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2010). In 2014, he published his first nonfiction work, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. His clear-eyed observation of 21st-century crises lies at the heart of his highly anticipated forthcoming book, After Nations (2026), which explores the dissipation of the powers of the nation-state and seeks ways for us to navigate the resulting confusion. As an essayist, Dasgupta has contributed to distinguished outlets such as Harper’s, Granta, and The New Statesman. For several years, he taught a course on 21st-century culture and ideas at Brown University. His lectures on the nation-state, and the possibilities beyond it, have been hosted by the Berggruen Institute, the Serpentine Gallery, the House of World Cultures, and elsewhere.

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Anthony Vahni Capildeo was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and lives in the UK. One finds a sacred wonder and delight in language in every poem in each of their nine collections and eight chapbooks. Capildeo studied Old Norse and translation while earning their DPhil at Oxford University. The recipient of many awards including Forward Prize for Best Collection for Measures of Expatriation (2016) and the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship (2014), Capildeo is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. They are currently a professor and writer-in-residence at the University of York.

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Prize Director Michael Kelleher talks to 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama recipient Roy Williams about Dael Orlandersmith's 2002 play Yellowman.

Roy Williams has written fifteen plays since The No Boys Cricket Club premiered at Theatre Stratford East in 1996. Williams’s many accolades include the Visionary Honours Award (2022), the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award (2011), the Alfred Fagon Award (2010 and 1997), the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2001), and a nomination for the Olivier Awards (2011). In addition to writing for the stage, Williams also writes for film, television, and radio.

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Patricia J. Williams was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A longtime former “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” columnist for The Nation, Williams is also the author of six books of nonfiction including most recently The Miracle of the Black Leg. A MacArthur fellow (2000), Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School. She is currently a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University.

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Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini is the author of Muscovado, Little Miss Burden, and the Olivier-award-winning Sleepova. Ibini is the recipient of the Inevitable Foundation x Loreen Arbus Elevate Collective Award (2024), a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2023), and an Alfred Fagon Audience Award (2015), among other honors. They have written across a variety of mediums including children’s books, for the screen, and audio dramas for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, and Audible. Ibini lives in East London.

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Mike sits with Sigrid Nunez, recipient of a 2025 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, to discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and whether or not it really is "the Great American Novel."

Sigrid Nunez is the author of ten books, including the National Book Award-winning novel The Friend (2018), which has been celebrated by the New York Times as one of the 100 best books of the 21st Century. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), a Berlin Prize Fellowship (2005), the Rome Prize in Literature (2001), and a Whiting Award (1993), Nunez has taught at Boston University, Columbia, the New School, and Princeton, among other institutions with esteemed literary programs, and now devotes herself to writing.

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