When a Sharp Novelist Finds Van Doren's Shakespeare

By Andy — 2026-07-29 — Literary News

I heard that Gwendoline Riley won the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize and is now doing podcasts about Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare. At first, that seemed like the kind of thing winners do—get interviewed, talk about their influences, move on.

Then I thought about who Riley actually is.

Riley has written seven novels, none of them particularly interested in the grand gesture. Her narrators don't announce themselves. They watch. They measure. In First Love and My Phantoms, people sit across tables from each other trying to say what they mean and mostly failing—which is, more or less, the entire human condition if you're paying attention. Her latest, The Palm House, is about two friends in London spending an evening together, two middle-aged people discussing the small catastrophes of their lives with the kind of precision that makes ordinary speech sound almost unbearably real.

What would such a writer find in Shakespeare criticism?

Probably not the academic kind. Not the kind that performs knowledge like a suit. Van Doren's book features essays about each play written "without a hint of pedantry"—this matters. Van Doren wrote as someone whose "love of Shakespeare" exceeded his own, or something like that. It's a book that talks to you. Not at you.

Actually, that's not quite right. Van Doren doesn't talk at all. He listens to the plays and then tries to say what he heard.

Riley reads people the same way. Her prose watches how shoulders move in a pub, where a hand rests on a glass, what someone's silence means. She's not looking for beauty in the obvious places. She's looking for it in the muscle and bone of how we actually live. In the failure, even—especially in the failure.

So when I read that she was talking about Van Doren, I realized something. She wasn't picking a critic because he was famous or because the prize people suggested it. She was picking someone who seemed to do what she does: look at something closely enough that you stop performing for it and it starts showing you things you didn't ask to see.

That's not the kind of reading that makes you feel smart.

It's the kind that makes you feel seen. And a writer like Riley would recognize that in a heartbeat, would want to talk about it, would want you to know where she found it.