The 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers: Shortlist

THE 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers is Britain’s most lucrative literary award which promotes English-language poetry and drama as well as novels and short-story collections and is restricted to authors under the age of 30. With this prize, the spirit of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas is kept aflame. Believe it or not, the winner of the prize gets £60,000 (US$115,000), which is £10,000 more than the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The inaugural 2006 Dylan Thomas Prize was won by Welsh poet Rachel Tresize for her first collection of poetry, Fresh Apples.

The shortlist for the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize is as follows:

Novels
1. God’s Own Country (published as Out Backward in the U.S.) (Viking, 2008) / Ross Raisin
2. Blood Kin (Atlantic, 2007) / Ceridwen Dovey
3. Blackmoor (Simon and Schuster, 2008) / Edward Hogan

Stories
4. The Boat (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Nam Le
5. Children of the Revolution (Jonathan Cape, 2007) / Dinaw Mengestu

Poetry
6. Trouble Came to the Turnip (Carcanet, 2006) / Caroline Bird

The winner of the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize will be declared in November 2008