Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wins 2025 Holberg Prize

Gayatri Spivak, celebrated literary critic and postcolonial scholar, has won the 2025 Holberg Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of humanities, social sciences, law or theology research. The prize carries a $5,40,000 cash prize.

Spivak’s “critique of structures of power and knowledge in an unequal world” and efforts to combat “illiteracy in marginalised rural communities across several countries” make her a “highly worthy recipient of the prize” reads the citation note.

Spivak was born in 1942, Kolkata and rose to fame partly on the back of Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), an essay about the place of women in colonial India and how knowledge work has historically excluded marginalised people. The work has spawned decades of scholarship and criticism.