G wendoline Riley and I are talking over Zoom very early on the morning of Good Friday; she sits in a neat room, sipping tea from a mug with a cat on it in lieu of the pet she can’t have in her current accommodation - “a literal garret, but that’s probably where I was always going to end up”, she laughs, although she adds that she loves it. It’s possible that she might be feeling more tolerant of straitened circumstances because her work has just received significant critical – and material – recognition in the shape of a Windham-Campbell prize. These awards are the antithesis of many other hoopla-heavy literary prizes: each year, eight writers across fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry are given $175,000 (£135,000) to allow them to work with financial ease and security; previous winners include Anne Enright, Margo Jefferson and Yiyun Li.…