The Australian author had in fact been awarded one of the world’s richest literary awards, worth AUD$207,000.

Renowned Australian writer Helen Garner received what she thought was a spam email last week, and nearly deleted it without even opening it. Luckily she didn’t, for it contained an announcement advising her that had just won the Windham-Campbell Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and valuable literary awards worth AUD$207,000.

Deciding by chance to open the email, Garner read that Yale University wished to advise her of “good news” and were requesting her phone number. “I thought, definitely somebody’s having me on,” she said in an interview on RN Drive. A bit sceptical, she contacted her publisher to enquire more about the prize and to ask whether it was in fact real.  A representative from Yale University then contacted her to confirm that she had indeed won the prize in honour of her four-decade career writing non-fiction and crime works. “I nearly keeled over,” Garner told The Guardian. “I’m staggered. I feel thrilled and validated.”

Helen Garner’s oeuvre includes more than a dozen books, with each exploring the fragility of human emotion and the reality of lived circumstances. Her most recent novel, This House of Grief, narrates the story of a father charged with the murder of his three young sons after deliberately driving his car into a dam. Garner describes her work as an examination of the “excruciating realms of human behaviour, where reason fights to gain purpose, and everybody feels entitled to an opinion”. 

The Windham-Campbell Prize is unique, in that there is no submission process or shortlisting. Works are judged anonymously, and writers are entirely surprised when they are informed of having won, as they are entirely unaware that their work was under consideration. Garner was one of nine international authors who were contacted out of the blue: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (United States), Hannah Moscovitch (Canada), Abbie Spallen (Ireland), Tessa Hadley (United Kingdom), C.E. Morgan (United States), Jerry Pinto (India), Hilton Als (United States), and Stanley Crouch (United States).

The Windham-Campbell Prizes were established in 2013 with a gift from the late Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell. The nine prizes, worth AUD$207,000 each, are awarded to writers who demonstrate outstanding commitment and achievement in fiction, nonfiction and drama. Garner, who won the 2008 Queensland Premier’s Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction for her controversial novel The Spare Room, is honoured to have won as a non-fiction writer. “In Australia, my non-fiction, it never wins any prizes,” she told ABC News. “I think it causes dissent and torrid scenes [on prize juries]. I think what’s most gratifying to me is that it’s for a body of non-fiction work. I am in a position where I will be able to give some of it away…and it’s sort of ironic in a sense that you get a big prize when you’re in your 70s.” 

You can hear the full interview with Helen Garner on ABC RN Drive. For more information on the Windham-Campbell Prizes, visit their website.