Australian Tamil writer S.Shakthidharan wins prestigious award & £130,000 prize

Born in Sri Lanka and raised in Sydney, S.Shakthidharan, a prominent Australian Tamil writer has been awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for 2026.

Shakthidharan is currently in Killinochi, located in northern Sri Lanka, shooting his debut film – The Laugh of Lakshmi, focusing on a mother and son separated by civil war.

On receiving the prize, Shakthidharan said, “I am still in shock about this tremendous and utterly surprising news. To be recognised by a global award of this stature is incredibly affirming, and I suspect it will be life-changing.”

He will receive a prize fund worth US$175,000 (£130,000) to support his work. The prize was established to allow writers to focus on their creative practice independent of financial concerns.

The American award, administered by Yale University and awarded by anonymous judges, recognise 8 writers each year for literary achievement across four categories – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

Shakthi was selected in the category of drama for his “ambition and scale, and his deep care and understanding of character, as demonstrated in his multigenerational epic Counting and Cracking”. The selection committee noted: “S Shakthidharan draws from Tamil-Sri Lankan, South Asian, and Australian pasts to forge new meanings and connections among sprawling and complex histories.”

The theatre production, Counting and Cracking (2019, which had an incredible run in Australia, with shows in the UK & America, follows four generations of a Tamil family from Sri Lanka to Australia. It won multiple accolades, including the Victorian Prize for Literature, the NSW Premier’s Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting, and seven Helpmann Awards.

His second theatre production, The Jungle and the Sea (2022), exploring the toll of the Sri Lankan civil war on family, received critical acclaim and won the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama.

Follow Shakthi’s journey here ; @shakthidharan