The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast presents a sequence of exchanges with former and current Windham-Campbell Prize laureates, exploring the books and plays they hold dear. The conversations are hosted by Michael Kelleher.
In this episode, Prize Director Michael Kelleher converses with Kei Miller, the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient in Nonfiction, about Yuval Noah Harari’s expansive and sometimes controversial volume Sapiens and the notion that humanity is a form of fiction (and that fiction itself can be deemed human).
Kei Miller hails from Jamaica and is celebrated as a poet, essayist, and novelist. He has been shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and has won the esteemed Forward Poetry Prize for his collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. His most recent work is the 2021 essay collection Things I Have Withheld. His collection of stories, Fear of Stones, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and his latest novel, Augustown, reached the PEN Open Book Award final and won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave Medal for his contributions to literature, and in 2018 he received the Anthony Sabga Medal for Arts & Letters. His teaching stints have included the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway, and Exeter, and in 2019 he served as the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a production of Literary Hub
Hosted by Michael Kelleher
Theme music by Dani Lencioni
Produced and edited by Drew Broussard
