Christina Anderson and S. Shakthidharan Receive Windham-Campbell Prize For Drama
They were each awarded $175,000.
American playwright Christina Anderson and Sri Lankan-Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan were the recipients of this year's Windham-Campbell prize for drama. They were each awarded $175,000.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. The first prizes were announced on Monday, March 4, 2013. A ceremony conferring the awards took place at Yale on September 10, 2013, followed by a week-long celebration of the writers. In addition to a citation and award, recipients of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes receive an unrestricted grant of $175,000 to support their writing.
About Christina Anderson
With a passion for history and a keen ear for language, Christina Anderson is an American playwright with a global audience. Her plays, from Inked Baby (2009) to the ripple, the wave that carried me home (2022), explore ways to endure the struggles that arise from trying to find one's place in a willfully ignorant society. Good Goods (2012), for example, uses ghosts both literal and figurative to explore the theme of “possession” and what it might mean to own ourselves. In this play, Anderson’s love for research and far-ranging inspirations, including work by Black artists like Audre Lorde, Marlon Riggs, and Nina Simone, coalesce into a beautifully dream-like love story. How to Catch Creation (2019) likewise confronts the tragedies of the past while remaining open to the possibility of a more just future as it follows characters committed to their dreams despite economic inequality and a broken legal system. Through all her work, Anderson’s deep enthusiasm for linguistic delight—rhyming, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and more—runs true. Drawing on a youth immersed in the melodious rhapsody of spoken poetry and hip hop, Anderson has said, “Language is one of our biggest resources, so why not have fun with it?” The recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, among other honors, Anderson has taught playwriting at various institutions including her alma mater, the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.
About S. Shakthidharan
The playwright S. Shakthidharan was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Sydney, Australia, where he currently lives. Shakthidharan is a rare storyteller whose work traverses time and space while remaining anchored in core emotional truths. Inspired by his own family history, he made his theatrical debut with Counting and Cracking (Associate Writer, Eamon Flack) (2019)—an epic three-and-a-half-hour family saga spanning nearly five decades, set across a dozen locations, and featuring a plot twist that leaves audiences amazed at the sheer range of Shakthidharan’s talent. His fourth and latest play, The Wrong Gods (2025), about a mother and daughter in a paradisiacal riverside valley in India, cemented his reputation for skillfully distilling large-scale tragedies into intimate terms. In a tribute to the Narmada Bachao Andolan—an Indian social movement primarily led by women launched in the ’80s to protect people from displacement—most of those involved with the play, from the cast to the production team, are women, including the co-director Hannah Goodwin. Defying local expectations, Shakthidharan brings his whole self—both the Eastern and Western aspects—to his work, opening space for a richer definition of what “Australian theater” can be. Shakthidharan is the recipient of the Green Room Award for Outstanding New Australian Writing (2024) and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and Prize for Drama (2020), among other honors.
