25th February, 2015
Teju Cole and Helon Habila have won the 2015 Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes in the fiction category. The duo are joined by seven other writers from across the globe.
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library announced the winners of the Literature Prizes at Yale. The writers, who hail from nine countries, were chosen confidentially in three categories — fiction, non-fiction and drama.
Honoured for their literary achievements as well as their potential, the winners will each receive $150,000 to support their work.
The 2015 winners are: in fiction, Teju Cole, Helon Habila, and Ivan Vladislavić; in non-fiction, Edmund de Waal, Geoff Dyer, and John Jeremiah Sullivan; and in drama, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Helen Edmundson, and Debbie Tucker Green.
Cole is the author of two works of fiction Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief. In both of his works, he radically expands the understanding of the Diaspora and the dislocation in the twenty-first century. Born in the United States to Nigerian parents, Cole was raised in Lagos but currently resides in New York City.
Similarly, Habila has authored three novels. The former Arts Editor at Vanguard Newspaper rose to international acclaim after his short story, Love Poems, won the 2001 Caine Prize. The story was excerpted from his first novel, Waiting for an Angel (2002).
His second novel Measuring Time (2007) won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. In 2011, he published his latest novel Oil on Water and edited The Granta Book of the African Short Story. He is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University.
Watch the 2015 Prize Winner Announcement