The university’s Gothic arches and carved stone towers—17th century and 20th mingling seamlessly — were lit by lacy, tree-filtered sunlight in the early autumn light, offering a sanctuary in an increasingly polarised America.
A mild September breeze drifted through the campus at twilight, stirring the first yellow leaves on ancient elms and still-bright blooms on stone steps. Beneath a white festival tent, the laughter and voices of students mingled with professors and writers while the aroma of delicacies drifted from food trucks parked at the lawn’s edge. Students threaded through the crowd, aware that the world awaiting them was changing: universities everywhere were cutting back on arts and humanities, entire programmes vanishing under budget strain.
They are bright-eyed, curious, listening.
A mild September breeze drifted through the campus at twilight, stirring the first yellow leaves on ancient elms and still-bright blooms on stone steps. Beneath a white festival tent, the laughter and voices of students mingled with professors, writers, and guests while the aroma of delicacies drifted from food trucks parked at the lawn’s edge. Students threaded through the crowd, aware that the world awaiting them was changing: universities everywhere were cutting back on arts and humanities, entire programmes vanishing under budget strain.
They are bright-eyed, curious, watching, listening.
The university’s Gothic arches and carved stone towers—17th and 20th centuries mingling seamlessly—were lit by lacy, tree-filtered sunlight in the early autumn light, offering a sanctuary in an increasingly polarised America.
I stood among those witnessing poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo’s moment of recognition.
Inside the Yale Centre for British Art, preparations were underway for the prize ceremony, where the following day Yale’s new president, Maurie McInnis, presented eight writers with certificates in one of the world’s richest literary honours of $US175,000.
Established through the estate of novelist Donald Windham in memory of his partner Sandy Campbell, the Windham–Campbell Prizes have, since 2013, supported more than 100 writers across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Each year, eight writers are nominated in secret and notified by an unexpected phone call. No applications, no campaigns, no lobbying—just recognition. That suddenness is part of its meaning: a reminder that literature still carries grace.
To walk here with Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Trinidad-born poet and 2025 Windham–Campbell laureate, was to feel a double incongruity. Gargoyles watched from parapets built to echo Oxford and Cambridge, but that night they looked down on a voice shaped in Port of Spain’s dusk, steeped in Caribbean cadences, honed in Old Norse halls.
Capildeo moved through the quadrangles gently but assuredly, as if testing each echo—a twin island voice resounding in one of the world’s grand literary arenas. Capildeo’s poetry, like their spiritual life, is grounded in silence—not as absence, but as attentive fullness. “A formation in prayer (Roman Catholic and formerly Hindu) and in philology,” they told The Yale Review, shaped their habits of “attention, concentration, self-emptying, and openness”.
Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, tells me the awards are global in reach and open at all stages of a writer’s career. “We support writers throughout the world and at various stages of their careers,” underlining that the selection process honours literary achievement or promise, not ideology or agenda. While details vary, the process is painstaking: judges read widely, engaging with dozens upon dozens of submissions and nominated works to ensure fairness and breadth.
When the call came, Capildeo was stunned. “It’s the most wonderful thing to feel connected to people (living and dead) who cared so much for the freedom of creative expression … it gives me courage,” they said, describing how the award “lifted weights that I didn’t even know were oppressing me … They called the news of the grant ‘unbelievable and actually life-changing …’”
Around them, the chorus of laureates offered complementary notes. Anne Enright spoke of “astonishing generosity”, while novelist Sigrid Nunez admitted to feeling “giddy joy”. Patricia J Williams described the award’s impact as “literally floating — this much pure joy is electric.” Rana Dasgupta called it a “beautiful prize overflowing with literary love”; Roy Williams offered nuanced truth-telling from the stage.
Playwright Matilda Feyisayo Ibini expressed “gratitude to my ancestors”, calling the prize “a thoughtful injection” into her creative future. And Tongo Eisen-Martin, whose Blood on the Fog charts the brutal clarity of Black American life, was “incredibly, incredibly honoured”.
For Anthony Vahni Capildeo, a poet who had long written doggedly—often against the chill of English and Scottish winters, often in difficult personal circumstances, often quite alone, always swimming upstream—such recognition may have felt less like a coronation than a reprieve: a moment of being visibly loved for their work.
Capildeo’s path to this moment had been anything but direct. Born in Port of Spain in 1973, they studied English at Christ Church, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, before completing a doctorate in Old Norse literature. Their thesis, Reading Egils saga Skallagrímssonar: saga, paratext, translations, was a way of listening.
“I love the ferocity and precision of skaldic verse,” they once reflected. “The extremity of the Icelandic landscape and the loyalty of the friendships made utterance feel both possible and not of too much consequence … There’d always be someone to hear me and always be something else happening … something big like a glacial chunk crashing or tiny like a crowberry ripening” (The Yale Review).
Today, they are Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York—a life given to poetry that now, with the Windham–Campbell, seems to have given something back: the freedom to write unfettered and protected, the greatest gift any writer can receive.
Over two decades and nine poetry collections, they have blurred boundaries between poetry, essay, and memoir. Their lines are known for “insistent playfulness and a radical political consciousness.” In one poem, the speaker marvels at fragile beauty:
“After all this hiding, no surprise /
It’s like a thing in translation: /
eggshell-shy. A thumb’s worth of glory, /
nesting near the coastlines of your palm.”
Such work reveals both a delight in language and a belief in its capacity to unsettle, to reimagine, to heal.
Yet when I asked them about carrying the family legacy (they are second cousins to VS Naipaul), Capildeo resisted the easy path of invocation. “Ha! Nobody asks about the Bissoondath family legacy, do they?” they quipped. “The stories from Sangre Grande forest my path.” Their refusal to trade on Naipaul’s name—invoked frequently in literary conversation here—was its own form of agency, a reclamation of space for their own Caribbean voice.
At the prize-giving ceremony, Kwame Dawes (a past winner) delivered the keynote lecture, Why I Write. Dawes’s body of work, like Capildeo’s, insisted on the centrality of poetry in the aftermath of historical rupture. Born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica, Kwame Dawes writes out of histories marked by colonialism, exile, and faith. In more than 20 collections, including Prophets and City of Bones, he maps the emotional and political weight of diaspora with clarity and force. Like Capildeo, he listens for the pain of forced displacements that history tries to erase—and answers in a voice that stays, that says, ‘I’m here. We are here.”
That insistence resonated with Capildeo’s own practice. In response to questions about poetry’s responsibility in an age when the humanities are under siege, they answered without hesitation: “Revolution of love, truth, and beauty.” Asked about courage, they said, “Nowadays I hope for the courage to stop, to slow down, to pay attention, and have foolish, extravagant patience in building community. Organising with Fossil Free Books and praying and working with Caritas: Justice and Peace call me to imagine the world otherwise.”
Their poetry, like Dawes’s oration, demonstrates that Caribbean voices forged in displacement are central—languages and memory carried intact across continents, hammered by history into something both fragile and steely.
Asked how it felt to be chosen without campaigning, they said, “It really feels like being picked up by a huge wave, and I’m not yet on shore … How many currents of reflection and goodwill went into that decision-making?” Pressed about what they could do next, they demurred: “I am going to carry on as normal. Kamau Brathwaite’s old woman sweeps the sea. I scribble in notebooks.”
That modesty, even self-effacement, concealed the scale of what their presence represented. At the Bocas Lit Fest earlier this year, their collection Polkadot Wounds won the Poetry Prize, affirming their stature at home in Trinidad. To stand now on Yale’s campus, amid Gothic towers and rare manuscripts, was to see a Caribbean poet as centre.
The Capildeos have produced novelists and thinkers, among them Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, a second cousin. Capildeo’s refusal to trade on Naipaul’s reputation, their insistence on tracing their own path, felt like part of the same reclamation Dawes invoked: the right to speak in a language forged under duress yet carrying an almost unbearable beauty.
And in one of the most intimate festival conversations—Poetry, Faith, and Silence—Capildeo, a convert to Christianity, spoke with determination. “I don’t want a poem that’s well-behaved,” they said. They believed that a poem should stand in solidarity with “the one who is most vulnerable.”
They spoke about those who are not in the room—their light, their absence, and the duty to witness that. Capildeo paused while speaking when a siren went off on the street and asked for silence. We understood that poetry is not a separate thing. It is the opposite—a call to really see other humans beneath the mask, to make the invisible visible to understand absence and the often devastating reasons behind it. Capildeo called for us to slow down, to really listen. Not just to poetry. To one another.
By the festival’s close, what lingered was solidarity. As always, books and words peeled back the layers to show us that the fund of what is common between people of all races and nations runs deep. We all want the same things: love, safety, truth, dignity, justice, beauty, community, witness, legacy.
This four-day Windham-Campbell festival at Yale reminded participants and witnesses just that—what it means to simply be human, to be tender with one another in this brief, uncertain, and fragile life.
For Capildeo, the award was recognition—and a much-needed protection for all writers: the space to write without compromise. For me, Anthony Vahni Capildeo’s voice is a reminder that Caribbean literature continues to shape the world’s imagination. As a proud West Indian.
I could not have asked for a greater honour than to be a witness to this.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir Love The Dark Days.
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