NEW YORK CITY: Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Lucas Hnath have been named the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prizes in the drama category. The prizes, which recognize writers of all disciplines around the world, are administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Each prize recipient receives $165,000. They will be honored with their prizes on Sept 12-14, at a literary festival at Yale.
Writers from around the world are nominated confidentially and judged anonymously.
Lucas Hnath is the writer of A Doll’s House, Part 2, The Christians, and Red Speedo. The press release for the prize described his writing as “agile” and that it “ranges across genres and subjects with voracious curiosity; his wit, formal daring, and poetic precision crystallize dramas that are socially incisive and indelible.”
Suzan-Lori Parks‘s work includes Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer Prize winner), In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), and Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3). She is described in the press release as “an artist whose ethical imagination confronts rather than consoles; she acknowledges in the fissures of language and human relations the complexities of a fraught world.”
Previous playwrights who’ve taken home this honor include Ike Holter, Marina Carr, Abbie Spallen, Hannah Moscovitch, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Debbie Tucker Green, Helen Edmundson, and Jackie Sibblies Drury.
