The Irish novelist Anne Enright is one of eight writers set to receive $175,000 (£135,000) each in recognition of their life’s work.

American writer Sigrid Nunez was also selected as part of this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes, which each year award $1.4m to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, with the aim of allowing writers to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.

“The sense of unreality has not left me since the news came in – what an astonishing thing to drop out of a clear blue sky,” said Enright, the author of three short story collections and eight novels including the Booker-winning The Gathering and, most recently, The Wren, The Wren.

“In her wide-ranging and wryly unsentimental fiction, Anne Enright explores the limitations and joys of our human need for belonging,” said this year’s selection committee, which remains anonymous.

Fellow fiction category winner Nunez, whose novels include The Vulnerables and The Friend, said that she was “giddy with joy” on finding out she had won. Nunez “can make us care about anything”, wrote Sam Byers in a Guardian review of The Vulnerables. “The concerns of the moment are rendered not as clumsy drama, but as living subjects of conversation; sites of intimacy and disagreement.”

British playwright Roy Williams was recognised in the drama category, describing the award as an “unexpected delight”. His plays include the Death of England series, co-written with Clint Dyer, and The Lonely Londoners. Williams’s “nuanced, multivocal portrayals of race and class lay bare uncomfortable truths about British identity, creating an essential and complex theatre of contemporary life”, said the selection committee.

A second UK-based playwright, Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, was also chosen for drama. “I am over the moon and currently hurtling through space somewhere near Jupiter,” they said. Their 2023 play Sleepova, about a sleepover between four friends, won the Olivier award for outstanding achievement in affiliate theatre. “[Ibini’s] exuberant plays barrel on to the stage with joyful abandon, loosening the knots in the fabric of our socio-political lives with forensic attention to reveal new, hopeful ways of remaking the world,” said the judges.

Trinidadian Scottish poet Anthony V Capildeo said that winning one of this year’s poetry prizes “lifted weights that I didn’t even know were oppressing me internally”. Their 2016 collection, Measures of Expatriation, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and won the Forward prize. American poet Tongo Eisen-Martin was named as the second poetry recipient this year.

British novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta was selected in the nonfiction category, for work including his 2014 book Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi.

American legal scholar Patricia J Williams, who was also named as a nonfiction winner, said that she was “literally floating” upon finding out she’d been given a prize. Her most recent book, The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law, explores bioethics, critical race theory and the US supreme court.

The prizes are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke rare book and manuscript library, and awarded to writers living in any part of the world and writing in English. The prizes were first given in 2013.

Past recipients include Olivia Laing, Tessa Hadley, Edmund de Waal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Percival Everett, Teju Cole and Pankaj Mishra.