When the Prize Comes to the Podcast: Gwendoline Riley Talks Mark Van Doren

By Andy — 2026-07-29 — Literary News

The Windham-Campbell Prizes podcast dropped a conversation nobody was asking for. Except, maybe, people who actually read.

Gwendoline Riley, who'd just won the 2026 prize for fiction, sat down with the prize director to talk about Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare. Not Riley's own novels—those meticulous, unflinching things about people failing to connect. Not contemporary lit. A book from 1939 by a Columbia professor who wrote about the Bard the way other people talk about the weather.

That's where the real story lives.

Riley's on record—or was, before the podcast—as one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today, according to the TLS in 2018. She's written seven novels. None of them are about Shakespeare. The newest, The Palm House, is a two-hundred-page study of friendship and small humiliations in London. Very Riley: precise, cruel-enough-to-be-funny, nobody gets what they want.

So why spend an hour talking about a dead American critic and his essays on plays everyone's already read?

Actually, that's not quite right. Most people haven't read Van Doren. They've read *about* Shakespeare. They've written essays comparing Hamlet to their own depression. Van Doren was the kind of critic who just sat with the plays themselves—not searching for meaning, not building a theory, just reading. Really reading. Van Doren wrote "without a hint of pedantry," in essays that feel "smart, witty, deeply perceptive." The man taught at Columbia for nearly forty years and inspired writers like Thomas Merton and Allen Ginsberg. But that's the historical stuff. The useful bit is simpler: he treated Shakespeare like a conversation, not a corpse to dissect.

Riley's new prize—$175,000, freedom from financial constraint—changes nothing about how she works. She's always written this way: watching people say the wrong things, miss the point entirely, collide with each other in kitchens and pubs. The Palm House is two characters trying to keep a friendship alive while the world makes it harder. Dialogue is more or less her instrument.

Which is why Van Doren matters to her, maybe.

A critic who listens. Who doesn't need to prove something. Who reads a play and tells you what he sees, without flinching from the fact that a line might be funny and terrible at once, that Shakespeare sometimes gets things wrong, that a play can be endlessly re-readable without being endlessly profound.

The podcast is the kind of thing a prize does now—content, conversation, something to link to. But the real thing happening here is quieter. A writer who's spent twenty years making people uncomfortable on purpose, nailing the moment when someone's about to say something they shouldn't, suddenly saying: I need the thing this old man made. I need it more than I need to explain why.

Maybe that's the shadow side of being a writer in your forties. You stop looking for permission. You just start looking for readers who actually read.