Sri Lankan-Australian playwright S Shakthidharan, widely known as Shakthi, has won the US$175,000 (A$250,000) Windham-Campbell Prize for drama, one of the largest and most prestigious literary awards in the world.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and are awarded annually to writers working in English across four categories — fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry. Unlike most literary awards, they recognise a writer’s body of work rather than a single book, and they come with no conditions on how the money is used.
Shakthi is widely considered one of the most important voices in contemporary Australian theatre and is best known for “Counting and Cracking,” an epic family drama that traces the Sri Lankan civil war across generations and continents. The play, which premiered at the Sydney Festival and was later staged internationally, drew on his own family’s migration story and was praised for bringing Sri Lankan history to global stages with unusual scale and emotional depth.
Born in Sri Lanka and raised in Australia, Shakthi is also the founder of Kurinjpin Theatre, the South-West Sydney arts company that developed “Counting and Cracking” over nearly a decade. His work frequently engages with questions of displacement, political memory and the Tamil experience, and he has become a key figure in shaping how the Sri Lankan diaspora tells its own story on stage.
The Windham-Campbell win is a major international validation for a writer who has long championed under-represented voices in Australian theatre, and it adds to a growing body of global recognition for Sri Lankan-origin artists working in literature and performance.
