Canadian author Andre Alexis gets $165K as Windham Campbell Prize recipient

Canadian author Andre Alexis has been named one of eight recipients of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize, which comes with a cheque for US$165,000. (Photo: Literary Press Group of Canada/Facebook)

NEW HAVEN, Conn.—Canadian author Andre Alexis has been named one of eight recipients of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize, which comes with a cheque for US$165,000.

Billed as one of the world’s richest literature prizes, it is awarded to poets and writers of fiction, non-fiction and drama to support their literary pursuits.

Alexis won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2015 for “Fifteen Dogs,”a story about 15 pooches gifted by gods with the skills of human consciousness and language.

The Trinidad native, who was raised in Ottawa, was hailed by the Windham-Campbell Prize judges for his “mastery of literature’s history and a startling power of invention, balancing intellectual sophistication with a sense of humour, pathos, and beauty.”

This year’s other winners were Carolyn Forche, Ike Holter and Maya Jasanoff of the United States; Erna Brodber of Jamaica; Marina Carr of Ireland; Ashleigh Young of New Zealand; and Australian aboriginal writer Ali Cobby Eckermann.

Canadian drama writer Hannah Moscovitch was a recipient of the prize last year.