Writers are nominated in secret for their entire body of work. Past Australian winners include Helen Garner, Patricia Cornelius and Ali Cobby Eckermann.

A few weeks ago, while in Sri Lanka filming his debut film The Laugh of Lakshmi, writer and playwright S Shakthidharan, often referred to as Shakthi, received a life-changing email. He had won the Windham-Campbell Prize for drama valued at US$175,000 (approximately $250,000).

Writers cannot apply for the award; rather, they are nominated in secret and judged for their entire body of work.

For Shakthidharan, that includes Counting and Cracking, co-written with Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack; his latest play The Wrong Gods which opened in Sydney last year; and The Jungle and the Sea – another collaboration with Flack – which is a follow-up to Counting and Cracking, unpacking the aftermath of the civil war in northern Sri Lanka. First performed in 2022, The Jungle and the Sea will return in Melbourne and Sydney later this year.

Shakthidharan’s family fled Sri Lanka following the bloody anti-Tamil pogrom known as Black July and landed in western Sydney, a journey he documented in his memoir Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, which he’ll unpack at the Sydney Writers’ Festival next month.

The Windham-Campbell organisation describes Shakthidharan as “a rare storyteller whose work traverses time and space while remaining anchored in core emotional truths”.

In a statement posted to his Instagram, the playwright says he’s “still in shock” and describes the prize as “life-changing in its impact”.

“This prize is global, for anyone writing in English. Some incredible writers have won it in the past. You can’t apply for it; you can only be nominated secretly,” he continued.

“You find out if you win through a random email late at night – in my case, at the back end of a long day of shooting the film in Sri Lanka. Totally surreal. To my knowledge, neither a Sri Lankan nor a migrant Australian have ever won the prize.

“The prize is for an artist’s body of work. The judges decide the winners by reading their work. This means a group of strangers overseas – who had never heard of me – were taken in by these stories of Asia and Australia and chose to embrace them.

“I like that. It’s what writing can do: pull you in to the specific, vulnerable, emotional truths of a place and a people you have never encountered before.”