It’s been a big week for literary prizes with the announcement of the Man Booker long list hogging most of the headlines. This has resulted in the long list for the annual Dylan Thomas Prize going largely unnoticed which is a shame, not least because this is the centenary year of the Wales’s most famous son.
The Dylan Thomas prize was set up seven years ago to encourage and develop exciting young talent and is open to writers aged 39, across all genres. The list just announced includes former Man Booker winner Eleanor Catton (the Luminaries) and Bailey’s Women’s Prize winner Eimear McBride (A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing). Welsh poet and author Owen Sheers is there as is fellow poet Jamaican Kei Miller, crime writer Tom Rob Smith and the Peruvian born Daniel Alarcon for his engaging At Night We Walk in Circles.
One of the judges, Cerys Matthews described this year’s long list as “truly delicious”. Below are the ingredients:
- Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles (Fourth Estate)
- Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (Granta)
- John Donnelly, The Pass (Faber & Faber)
- Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Viking)
- Emma Healey, Elizabeth is Missing (Viking)
- Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess (Atlantic Books)
- Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Faber & Faber)
- Kseniya Melnik, Snow in May (Fourth Estate)
- Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet Press)
- Nadifa Mohamed, The Orchard of Lost Souls (Simon & Schuster)
- Owen Sheers, Mametz (National Theatre Wales)
- Tom Rob Smith, The Farm (Simon & Schuster)
- Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar (Knopf (US)/Hutchinson (UK))
- Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway (Picador)
- Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees (Atlantic Books)
The shortlist will be announced on September 4 as part of Dylan Unchained, the Dylan Thomas centenary conference at Swansea University in Wales. The winner will be announced in November.
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