Gwendoline Riley on Shakespeare the Way a Reader Should Know It

By Andy — 2026-07-29 — Literary News

I've been sitting with a podcast episode from late July. Gwendoline Riley, the London novelist who received the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2026 for her body of work, was speaking about Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare—a book I realised I'd never heard anyone actually defend in conversation. Not praised ceremonially. Not dragged into a syllabus. Just defended.

The conversation was for the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast, a series where past and present prize winners talk about books they love. The episode title promised Riley's "top 5 Shakespeare plays" too, which is the kind of thing that makes people roll their eyes. But Riley doesn't roll. She writes small, precise novels about people failing to communicate, so she knows the danger of expecting too much from rankings.

Van Doren's book is something else.

Published first in 1939, reprinted many times since—most recently by New York Review Books Classics—it's structured as a series of essays, one per play. The legendary book by an esteemed poet and beloved professor at Columbia University features a series of smart, witty, deeply perceptive essays about each of Shakespeare's plays, together with a further discussion of the poems.

Actually, that's the official line. What the book does is different.

Van Doren elucidates both the astonishing boldness and myriad subtleties of Shakespeare's protean art. More importantly: Van Doren's prose is familiar, easy, and full of love. It is almost a conversation, and hardly less a joy to read than Shakespeare himself. The man doesn't lecture. He speaks like he's thinking aloud with someone smarter than he'd usually admit to.

Riley herself is known for this—the conversation inside the prose.

She is the author of seven novels, including First Love, My Phantoms, and most recently, The Palm House. In 2018, the Times Literary Supplement named her one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today. Her work doesn't perform. It eavesdrops. One doesn't read Riley for plot; each book is an assemblage of episodes. She wields dialogue like a Swiss army knife, now corkscrewed, now serrated, but always coming to a short, sharp point.

So there's something natural about her wanting to talk about Van Doren. They're both writers who trust the reader enough not to explain the obvious.

Which is, more or less, why Van Doren's book still matters.

It doesn't ask you to have a theory. No deconstruction. No narrative complexity layered over the top. Writing with an incomparable knowledge of his subject but without a hint of pedantry, Van Doren elucidates both the astonishing boldness and myriad subtleties of Shakespeare's protean art. You can pick it up not knowing anything and come away understanding something real about why Hamlet works, or why The Tempest breaks differently than you expected. That's rarer than it should be.

And Riley's prize matters because writers like her—slow, exact, uninterested in trends—don't get to keep writing unless something external says it's worth the cost. The Windham-Campbell gives them that space. Winners receive $175k, with the goal of enabling outstanding writers to work without financial constraints.

The podcast is just her saying it out loud. Van Doren knew how to read. Riley knows how to read. If they want to talk about Shakespeare that way—like it's a book you pick up to learn something, not to prove you know something—maybe the rest of us should listen.