The Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin was on a trip with her family to mark her 50th birthday when the phone rang and she discovered she’d won one of this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes, announced on Wednesday evening. The $165,000 (£125,000) award came at a good time, McLaughlin revealed.

“It was like a miracle,” she said, “arriving at a time when I was experiencing a bit of a wobble, psychologically, in my writing life. In a sense, it was like an answer to a question I had started asking myself.”

The Windham-Campbell prizes are among the richest literary prizes in the world, with eight authors writing in English selected each year to “call attention to literary achievement” and allow writers to “focus on their work independent of financial concerns”.

McLaughlin is joined on this year’s roster by essayist Rebecca Solnit, journalist and historian Raghu Karnad, novelist David Chariandy, poets Kwame Dawes and Ishion Hutchinson and playwrights Patricia Cornelius and Young Jean Lee. McLaughlin, who made her publishing debut in 2015 with a collection of short fiction, was cited by judges for stories that “capture the beauty and brutality of human relationships, imbuing them with near-magical qualities rooted in the details of everyday life in a manner both wry and resonant”.

It is 10 years since McLaughlin stopped practising law after falling ill, and she had started asking herself “if maybe I should be thinking of returning to legal practice.

“A lot of the writing life involves working on projects that not only don’t earn any money but are loss making,” she said. “So this kind of support is immensely important.” She’s now planning to “treat myself to a year of writing, writing, writing”.

The Windham-Campbell prizes were established in 2013, after the writer Donald Windham left his estate to Yale University. After struggling financially during the early part of his career, Windham and his partner Sandy Campbell, who died in 1988, had long wanted to create a literary award. Authors are nominated and judged anonymously, with winners notified out of the blue by the prize director Michael Kelleher.

Solnit, whose essay Men Explain Things to Me inspired the term “mansplaining”, said she was in Bogotá when she heard the news, “and after the sheer amazement settled, I felt so grateful to have this encouragement and support to do what I’ve wanted to do all my life: just write books”.

Canadian novelist Chariandy initially assumed the email from Kelleher was a practical joke, and still has “serious moments of doubt” that he has really won. “This prize is life-changing, since it affords me the chance to focus in a genuinely sustained way on my writing,” he said, explaining that he is currently “working on a triptych of a novel – a series of complicated but intimate affairs between people of African and South Asian descent, beginning in Trinidad during the uneasy post-emancipation/indenture period, and proceeding to Europe of the 50s and then North America of today”.

Both of the winning poets are published by Peepal Tree Press. Ghana-born and Jamaica-raised Dawes paid tribute to the small UK independent publisher: “Peepal Tree … have been a constant presence and force and co-conspirators on so much that we call growth and achievement, and so this award is for them”.

Dawes is currently in the middle of a “longstanding exchange of verse with the splendid Australian poet, John Kinsella” as well as a novel, which is “bringing its slow march to an end”. The award, he said, feels like affirmation of what he has been doing. “It is good to be seen,” he said. “My general reaction is gratitude, and joy because I could walk down the hall to the dining room and say to my wife Lorna, ‘Guess what?’ And we could laugh. And she could ask, ‘SO is there any money?’ And we could laugh more. And then tell the children, and they could laugh and say, ‘Nice one, pops.’ Which is delightful.”

Jamaican poet Hutchinson said he was completely floored by Kelleher’s email. “It provides a buffer between the demands of day-to-day work and the imaginative work I am involved in,” he said. Cited by judges for “conjuring Jamaica and the world within” in poetry that “surprises and stuns with formal innovation, musical clarity, and historical depth”, Hutchinson said that “the Caribbean is still an unexplored and very rich terrain, and I feel bound up in a kind of excavation of what it means in multiple ways, to be a Jamaican, in light of history and our contemporary moment”.

Previous winners of the award include the UK’s Olivia Laing, Australia’s Helen Garner and Jamaica’s Lorna Goodison. The 2019 winners were announced in London at an event in Stationers’ Hall, and are due to appear as part of a festival at Yale in September.