Poet Karen Solie is the only Canadian to receive this year’s literary award.Adrian Pope/Supplied
Canadian poet Karen Solie has won this year’s Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, worth US$175,000.
Solie is the only Canadian to receive this year’s literary award. This makes her the eleventh Canadian to win the Windham-Campbell Prize since its inaugural ceremony in 2013.
“Through precise, profound and wry plainspeaking verse, Karen Solie locates and interrogates the human apprehension of the world of things,” the Windham-Campbell selection committee said of Solie’s work.
Karen Solie’s poetic imagination continues to return to the places she’s left
Solie, who was born near Moose Jaw, Sask., and is now based in Toronto, has published six poetry collections, including Short Haul Engine in 2001 and last year’s Wellwater, which won her the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Poetry and the Governor General’s Literary Award. She teaches at the University of St. Andrews School of English. Solie has been renting short-term in both Toronto and St. Andrews, Scotland, and says the prize may give her the opportunity to put down sturdier roots. “It’s an immense source of relief,” she said in a telephone interview. “It means some sense of security and possibly stability.”
The Windham-Campbell prize, established in 2011 at Yale University, is awarded each year to eight writers – two each from the fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama categories – from around the world. The award is named for memoirist and novelist Donald Windham and stage actor and book reviewer Sandy Campbell, life partners who founded the prize with the aim of providing the kind of financial independence to writers that Windham struggled to attain in his early career. Today, each prizewinner is awarded US$175,000, from money willed toward the foundation of the prize by Windham when he passed away in 2010.
Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prize, admires how Solie’s work indirectly discusses politics and turns banal, everyday situations into “resonant” prose, adding that she deserves her growing reputation.
“There’s this kind of sensibility of Gen Xers that I recognize personally in the work,” Kelleher said. “This really detailed awareness of popular culture, and a way of using it as a mode of communication, and looking at it as something more than just a consumer product.”
The year’s second poetry winner is American writer Joyelle McSweeney. The full list of winners includes Gwendoline Riley, a fiction writer from the United Kingdom; American novelist and author Adam Ehrlich Sachs; Belgian-American writer and critic Lucy Sante; Jamaican poet Kei Miller; American playwright Christina Anderson; and Sri Lankan-Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan.
Solie joins four other Canadians who have won the Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, including Jen Hadfield and M. NourbeSe Philip in 2024, Canisia Lubrin in 2021, and Lorna Goodison in 2018. Journalist and non-fiction author John Vaillant was the first Canadian recipient in 2014.