The Dylan Thomas Prize is a new biennial literary prize, named after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, "awarded to the best published writer in English under the age of 30 from anywhere in the world".
The prize is unique in its broad range of eligible material, covering novels, short story collections, poetry collections and plays.
The winner of the prize receives £60,000. The prize was announced in 2004 and the inaugural prize was awarded in October 2006 to Rachel Trezise and Nam Le in 2008. From 2010 the prize will be awarded annually.
2010 Shortlist - Winner December 1
- Caroline Bird: UK poet and playwright, 23, the first writer to be nominated twice for the prize - for her third collection Watering Can
- Nadifa Mohamed: Novelist, 28, who said Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood was the inspiration for her work Black Mamba Boy which describes a journey from her Somalia homeland to Port Talbot
- Eleanor Catton: Novelist 24, who grew up in New Zealand explores the controversial topic of an affair between a high school girl and her teacher in The Rehearsal
- Karan Mahajan: Indian-born, 26 and the only man on the shortlist, with his debut novel Family Planning
- Elyse Fenton: US poet, 29, with her acclaimed collection Clamor, a book of war poety in which a woman reflects on her lover fighting in Afghanistan
- Emilie Mackie: Born in Winchester, aged 27, she based her novel And This is True in the Scottish Highlands where she grew up
2008 Winner | 2008 Shortlist | 2008 Longlist | 2006 |
2008Winners & Shortlist £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize.
A 29-year-old writer originally from Vietnam is the second winner of one of the world's biggest literary awards, the £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize.
Nam Le, who grew up in Australia, beat five rivals with his debut collection of short stories The Boat.
The prize was presented at the Brangwyn Hall, Swansea on Monday night, and he follows the first winner, Welsh writer Rachel Tresize, from Rhondda.
The global award, sponsored by the University of Wales, is open to any work, from any genre, which has beenpublished in English and written by someone under 30.
2008 Winner Dylan Thomas Prize Nam Le
THE BOAT
Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has previously received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. His fiction has appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, NPR's, Selected Shorts and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies.
The Boat is a stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take the readers from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling. In the opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam — and what seems at first a satire on turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son.
Shortlist Comment Book Award Tragic Blogspot | Award Tragic Blog "Rare Treat as Boat Comes in
Other 2008 Dylan Thomas Shortlisted Books
Caroline Bird
TROUBLE CAME TO THE TURNIP
Caroline Bird was born in 1986. She grew up in Leeds and attended the Steiner School in York before moving to London in 2001. She won the Poetry Society's Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Award two years running (1999 and 2000) and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002. Her poems have appeared in PNReview, Poetry Review, The North magazine and in Carcanet's New Poetries III anthology (2002). Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, built on the traditions of fairy tale, fantasy and romance, was published in 2002. Her second collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip, was published in September 2006. She is currently studyingEnglish at Oxford University.
In Trouble Came to the Turnip, Bird’s poems are ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always savagely humorous and self-mocking. Her world is inhabited by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake. And the turnip.
Ceridwen Dovey
BLOOD KIN
Ceridwen was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1980. Ceridwen grew up mostly in the small town of East London in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, but she and sister Liniwe went to high school in Sydney. After a year in London working and travelling, she did her undergraduate study at Harvard on scholarship, focusing on Social Anthropology and Visual & Environmental Studies (Film). Ceridwen moved to Cape Town for two years, where she wrote Blood Kin as her thesis for the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, with poet Stephen Watson as her supervisor. She now lives in New York City.
Blood Kin is a story of a president overthrown by a military coup in a nameless country, and in the midst of mass arrests, three members of the Presidential household – his barber, chef and portraitist – are taken hostage in a remote mountain palace. As the order falls, the truth about these men and significant lives is revealed, and the web of complicity and duplicity begins to unravel. Dovey’s mesmerizing debut grapples with humanity’s most mercenary and animalistic instincts, and reminds the reader that the mad king is within us all.
BLACKMOOR Edward Hogan
Edward Hogan was born in Derby, in 1980. He was working in Nottingham's Council House when he was writing his first novel. After leaving school Edward enrolled on the University of East Anglia's MA in Creative Writing course, winning the David Higham Award. After graduating he was signed up with publisher Simon & Schuster. Since the launch of Blackmoor Edward's been named as 'a writer to watch' by Peter Carty in The Independent whilst authors Miriam Toews and Hilary Mantel are also fans.
The book Blackmoor centres around a small mining community and Edward says he chose this setting because he wanted to find out more about the place he grew up. It's a regional book, about the midlands and the north and what has happened to the mining communities since people have stopped mining. His split time-frame is combined with multiple narrative perspectives, which enable him to dig deep into his characters. He is aided by writing that is charged with a bite and passion harking back to his Northern forebears; D.H. Lawrence, most obviously, with a passing touch of Charlotte Brontë.
Dinaw Mengestu
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in 1978 and is a graduate of Georgetwon and Columbia Universities. He works as a journalist and reviewer and is researching a book tracing his extended family’s exile from Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution. Children of the Revolution won the Guardian First Book Award in 2007.
Children of the revolution is a book about one man’s longing for the American dream, and of the tenacious grip of the past across continents and time. It is a tale of an Ethiopian immigrant’s search for acceptance, peace and identity. With effortless prose, Mengestu makes the reader feel this tortured soul’s longings, regrets, and in the end, his dreams of meaningful human connection.
Ross Raisin
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY
Ross Raisin was born in Yorkshire and now lives in London. He is twenty-seven years old. Before university he spent time working in the hotel trade, working in hotels in France and Ireland. When he graduated, he began working in a wine bar in London, eventually becoming co-manager. Ross has continued to work as a waiter while writing the novel, and still does so now as he begins his second, a novel about a Glaswegian ex-shipyard worker, whose life unravels after the death of his wife.
God’s Own Country is told through the eyes of the narrator, Sam Marsdyke - the teenage son of a farmer up on the Yorkshire Moors, who spends his days working the sheep, mending fences and trying to dodge the eye of his brutal, silent father, around him. One day a young daughter of a new family catches his eye. As he falls for the young, sophisticated girl from London, she begins to see him as a means to escape but this journey across the moors takes a terrifying menacing turn which, for Sam, will prove his terrible undoing.
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Ishq & Mushq by Priya Basil- Sarna is tormented by a mistake she made as a young woman in India. To stifle unwanted memories, she cooks zealously, sweetening her thoughts with syrup, or suffocating them with the hottest spice she can find. But when she receives an unexpected...
The Orientalist and the Ghost by Susan Barker - Malaya 1951, Christopher Milnar falls passionately in love with Chinese nurse Evangeline in a jungle resettlement camp - an affair that ends in tragedy when, under attack from Communist guerrillas, Christopher is betrayed, beaten and left for dead.
The Secret by Zoe Brigley- The Secret is a book of mystery and magic. Opening on familiar ground - retelling stories from the Bible, Celtic mythology, small-town rumours and urban mythologies - it gradually moves beyond its borders to narratives of Central America...
Zoology by Ben Dolnick - A funny, wise and heartwarming story of a young man's first forays into love during a long, hot summer in New York City. A funny, wise and heartwarming story of a young man's first forays into love during a long, hot summer in New York City.
Submarine by Joe Dunthorne - Convinced that his father is depressed and his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher, "a hippy-looking twonk", Oliver Tate embarks on a misguided campaign to bring the family back together. Meanwhile, he is also trying to lose his...
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Oystercatchers by Susan Fletcher- The second novel from highly acclaimed young writer Susan Fletcher, author of the award-winning 'Eve Green' The second novel from highly acclaimed young writer Susan Fletcher, author of the award-winning 'Eve Green' Amy lies in a coma.
Satsuma Sun Mover by Adam Green- A daft but ultimately quite profound tale about the chaotic happenstance which plunges a mild and underweight philosopher into the daring project of a modern day alchemist. A daft but ultimately quite profound tale about the chaotic happenstance...
Sons and Other Flammable Objects by Porohistra Khakpour- A debut novel centered around a family of Iranian immigrants in New York and Los Angeles at a moment that defined a generation of Americans, Sons and Other Flammable Objects is at once a comedy and atragedy, a family history and a modern coming-of-age story with a distinctly timeless resonance.
There is an Anger that Moves by Kei Miller - How we became the pirates 9 After all you do not know 10 Always under your breath 11 A whole song to the colour orange 12 The only thing far away 13 You say bomboclawt softly 14 Your dance is like a cure 15 How quickly you grow 16 Where we...
St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell- A collection of ten stories which chart loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up. Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat...
Rachel Trezise - Fresh Apples - Contains eleven wry stories on the power and beautiful transience of youth. Eleven wry and defiant stories on the power and beautiful transience of youth. Sarah's not abnormal or ugly, just a little bit fat, and she's got cerebral palsy.
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| 2006 Other Shortlisted
Lucy Caldwell - Where They Were Missed - It is Belfast in the 1980s and Daisy and Saoirse are living through the hottest summer ever. The yard is too hot, their mother keeps flying off the handle and their father doesn't come home until late. Police sirens whine through the streets at...
Ian Holding - Unfeeling- At sixteen, Davey is almost the man his father wants him to be, and almost the child he was. But, something from beyond the ages keeps him above, locked in shock, as beneath him his parents are murdered and his family's farm is 'reclaimed'.
Nick Laird - Utterly Monkey - A funny novel about where we're from and where we'd like to get to! A very funny, energetic, wonderfully engaging novel about where we're from and where we'd like to get to! Danny Williams is talented, upwardly mobile and has left his Northern...
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Nick Laird - To a Fault - In this debut, Nick Laird explores the sharp edge of relationships, from the intimacy of lovers to the brutality of political violence. Journeying between his native Ulster and his adopted London, he balances ideas of home and flight...
James Scudamore - The Amnesia Clinic - Anti, a quiet English boy living in Quito, Ecuador, strikes up a friendship with flamboyant classmate Fabian, who is everything Anti isn't: handsome, athletic and popular. What's more, he lives with his rakish Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in...
Liza Ward - Outside Valentine - In 1958, as the snow fell across Nebraska, 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann, climbed into a stolen car and blazed into history with a string of bloody murders that stunned America. This is a story of...
2006 Other Longlisted
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Susan Barker - Sayonara Bar - Mary, a blond graduate from England, has drifted into a job in a hostess lounge in Osaka. She is employed by Mama-san to spend her evenings flirting with rich Japanese salarymen, playing games and taking turns in the karaoke booth. Mary is in love...
Kira Cochrane - Escape Routes for Beginners - Rita Mae Jones longs to escape. She cannot understand why her mismatched parents chose to come to this prison island - a claustrophobic, brooding place. A prison riot then kickstarts a series of revelations as the Jones family's secrets come into...
Rodge Glass - No Fireworks- Abe Stone is a sixty-one-year-old alcoholic teacher going through his third divorce. When he starts receiving letters from his dead mother, Evelyn, he is thrown into a late-stage identity crisis. His fourteen-year-old grand-daughter, Lucille...
Joey Goebel - Torture the Artist -
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Emily Maguire - Taming the Beast- Sarah Clark's life is irrevocably changed at the age of fourteen when her English teacher, Mr Carr, seduces her after class. Their affair is illegal, erotic, passionate and dangerous - a vicious meeting of minds and bodies. But when Mr Carr's wife...
Matthew David Scott - Playing Mercy- Welcome to a world where you reputation, clothes and attitude are everything. Chris and his year eleven mates trade in cut-price sweets, cadged fags and favours for Graham who has a police scanner in his living room for company. Chris' plans to...
Talitha Stevenson - Exposure -A highly suspenseful, beautifully written morality tale for our times from the writer of An Empty Room - shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Alistair Langford, a high-powered lawyer, has at long last achieved 'almost all' his immense...
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