© Harry Taylor

Many congratulations to our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, for winning one of this year’s Windham Campbell Prizes. The citation calls him “an essayist of astonishing range … empathetic and bracingly intelligent.” We heartily agree.

If you haven’t heard of the Windham Campbell Prizes, that’s because this is only the third year they’ve been awarded— Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell founded the prize in 2013 “to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.” Awards are given for fiction, nonfiction, and drama, to those who write in English anywhere in the world.

“I couldn’t overstate how encouraging this award is,” Sullivan wrote, “or how practically helpful. In this phase of my writing life I feel a desperate need to stay down over the research I’m doing, not look up, and the prize makes that possible.”

Also among this year’s nine winners is Geoff Dyer, whose work has previously appeared in The Paris Review. We applaud him, too, along with all of this year’s prizewinners. In September, they’ll gather at Yale for a festival celebrating their work.