“I’m getting rather overheated reading this,” said the New Yorker’s theatre critic Hilton Als apologetically, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. He was describing the adventures of the European literary theorists Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, as they lost “their collective minds” in New York’s multiracial downtown gay scene of the 1980s: a scene in which Als himself came of age.
The stage of Yale University’s elegant Sprague Hall, with its two Steinway grand pianos pushed up against the back wall, is an unlikely place for stories of East Village bar-hopping and sexual awakenings. But Als’s story, delivered in a deep, rhythmic drawl, was a transfixing opening for the four-day Windham-Campbell Literary Festival.
Inaugurated in 2013, the festival celebrates the awarding of nine Windham-Campbell prizes, each worth $150,000, making it one of the more lucrative literary prizes around. This year’s recipients include John Jeremiah Sullivan, Geoff Dyer and Teju Cole. There’s panel discussions, performances and opportunities for readers to meet writers in a “literary speed dating” event.
“I started thinking about what is essential to making any piece of art, and that is that the artist remembers,” Als said. “And I wanted to write something about not wanting to remember – just because I like being contrary to myself.”
His lecture explored this paradox of recalling and recording those details one doesn’t want to remember: the failures of connection, the relentless exclusions of his “gay, black body”, the way that cynicism and irony fought off intimacy, and the failures of a politically engaged white, gay community to face up to its own privileges and prejudices – or in Als’s words: “A power elite that never would have called itself that, but thought it could call me … anything.”
This is the third year that the Windham-Campbell prizes have been awarded to nine writers, three in nonfiction, three in fiction and three in drama (there are plans to add poetry next year). While Dyer and Sullivan may seem like relatively familiar names for these laurels, the awards also reach writers less familiar to American audiences, like the British playwright Debbie Tucker Green and the Nigerian novelist Helon Habila.
This year, there has been a particular focus on Africa, with the honoring of Habila, the Nigerian American novelist Teju Cole, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic, as well as the African American playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. British playwright Helen Edmundson and nonfiction writer Edmund de Waal, author of the memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes, round out the nine winners.
The program’s director, Michael Kelleher, selects 60 experts each year to nominate established and newer writers for the prize, based on an overall body of work and future promise. An anonymous panel of jurors in each category narrows the selection to five, and then a different committee chooses the overall winners. No finalists or runners-up are announced: only the winners, who are named in March, and then invited to the festival in September.
The playwright and novelist Donald Windham did not come from a wealthy background, but his collaboration with Tennessee Williams on the Broadway play You Touched Me! earned him the financial freedom to write his first novel. The following year he met Sandy M Campbell, then a Princeton undergraduate, and the two men were a couple until Campbell’s death in 1988. Thanks to his inheritance of Campbell’s estate and the couple’s modest lifestyle, Windham – to the surprise of many who knew him – amassed a fortune substantial enough to be able to fund these prizes after his death in 2010. His basic recognition that what a writer needs most is uninterrupted time to write, forms the basis of the lucrative awards.
- The Windham-Campbell festival runs 28 September to 1 October at various locations on the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. All events are free and open to the public.
