Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wins Holberg Prize

The celebrated scholar is awarded for pushing back at conventional literary theory and broadening the boundaries of inclusivity in cultural discussions.

Scholar and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has received the Holberg Prize for 2025. Among the world's most prominent prizes for scholarship, the Holberg Prize annually recognises an excellent researcher within the humanities, social sciences, law or theology. It is sponsored by the Norwegian government and managed by the University of Bergen on behalf of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research and has a cash award of $540,000. Spivak will be awarded the prize on June 5 at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Spivak became a University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia in 2007. A faculty member of Columbia's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society since its inception, Spivak is a revered academic figure. Spivak has been influencing literary scholarship since the 1970s: her landmark essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak? " (1988), remains at the center of postcolonial inquiry. It holds in it the basic principles of her critical and ethical research: that hegemonic discourse silences the voices of groups at the margins of society, and literature has no right to be inclusive or "universal" until it includes those voices.

Spivak has specifically centered her attention on subaltern women, both in discursive practice and cultural institutions. Spivak was born in Kolkata on February 24, 1943. She studied at the University of Calcutta and later at Cornell University. Down the years, Spivak has kept alive her connection with Bengal, working closely with academics and authors like Mahasweta Devi. Her translation of Devi’s short story, “Draupadi”, helped bring the powerful, disruptive text to a wider audience. She starts her foreword to the translation with the words, "I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi).

For in Senanayak I find the closest approximation to the First World scholar in search of the Third World, I shall speak of him first." For Spivak, translation is a profoundly political and philosophical enterprise because it makes knowledge democratic. She has translated French philosopher Jacques Derrida's book, Of Grammatology, and brought the theory of deconstruction—defined by the Britannica as "a form of philosophical and literary analysis. that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or 'oppositions,' in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts"—to English-speaking readers. Spivak deconstructs "Draupadi" with deconstruction methodologies in the aforesaid foreword. 

Spivak has taught in self-supporting primary schools in India's most impoverished sections as part of her ongoing attempt to empower the marginalized to express their experience on their own terms. According to the Holberg Prize citation, "For Spivak, rigorous creativity must intersect with local initiatives to provide alternatives to intellectual colonialism.

Nine books have been written by Spivak, most influential among which is A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999). She has edited and translated some of the others. It has been translated into over 20 languages. The quote summarizes her accomplishments briefly: "Spivak's scholarship provokes readers, students, and scholars to "train the imagination" through extended engagement with literature and culture. Beginning with the centre of Western philosophy as a site of critical examination, she has made it possible, facilitated, and encouraged otherwise unimaginable trajectories of critical questioning—both at the centres and peripheries of world modernity.