Translator Kate Briggs among this year's Windham-Campbell prize winners

Briggs, whose book This Little Art focuses on the ‘strangenesses and paradoxes’ of translation, wins one of eight $165,000 grants aiming to give authors financial independence

The American author and poet Renee Gladman danced around the room when she learned she had been chosen as one of the recipients of the $165,000 (£120,000) Windham-Campbell prizes. Translator Kate Briggs, seeing an email from the prize’s director, thought she was going to be asked to present a prize; she had no expectation that $165,000 was shortly going to be hers.

One of the world’s richest literary awards, the Windham-Campbell prizes give an unrestricted grant of $165,000 to eight writers each year, celebrating “extraordinary literary achievement” by allowing them to “focus on their work independent of financial concerns”. This year’s recipients range from Briggs to the 85-year-old American memoirist Vivian Gornick. Organisers said the writers were all “pushing boundaries with brilliantly bold work, exploring deeply personal and political ideas around identity, race, sexuality and the immigrant experience”.

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