Image: Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Following a January Release of the Longlist
Even as the major trade shows and book fairs of the spring crowd the publishing industry’s schedules and require many professionals in the business to undertake an enormous amount of travel, the United Kingdom’s fascination with book and publishing awards programs demand the attention of press attention and the book business.
The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize released its longlist in late January. Today, we have the newly released shortlist for the 2025 prize cycle.
As Publishing Perspectives readers know, this £20,000 (US$25,898) Dylan Thomas Prize is a 19-year-old program for writers who are 39 or younger, because its namesake, Dylan Thomas, died at age 39 in November of 1953.
The Dylan Thomas also has an unusually wide purview of fiction in various formats, accepting nominations in novels, short stories, poetry, and playwrighting. This year’s longlist comprises eight novels, two short story collections, and two poetry collections.
A six-title shortlist is to be released on March 20, and the winner is to be named in Swansea on May 15, the day after International Dylan Thomas Day, as is the custom of this contest.
As we mentioned last week on the announcement of its 2025 winner, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for writers 35 and younger is the nearest competition for the Dylan Thomas and both programs tend to indulge in some needless and probably inaccurate superlatives in describing themselves to the reading public.
- The Dylan Thomas program is currently describing itself in its media messaging as “the world’s largest and most prestigious literary award for young writers.”
- The Sunday Times prize calls itself, “the most influential prize for young writers in the UK and Ireland”—like the Dylan Thomas, without offering any evidence of such a claim.
- And Publishing Perspectives, by the way, is the most eloquently written and most avidly read news medium in the English-language world. Eat your heart out, New York Times.
What could help both programs begin to establish some of the credibility they claim for themselves would be for them to report on what kind of marketplace effect their winners receive on a book’s sales. This is not impossible and not that difficult to do.
It would be interesting to see both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times’ Young Writer award join the £50,000 Booker Prizes (for fiction and international translation); the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction; and the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Cultural Understanding in reporting some of the market sales impact that a win can have for a book, its author, and publisher.
Without knowing the effects seen by booksellers, publishers, and authors following award winners’ announcements, the world publishing industry must simply take it on faith that the “golden sticker” on a cover in a bookstore can increase the likelihood of a sale. With each year of such deep and faithful investments in funds, hard work, and attention being poured into so many awards contests in world book markets—most frequently and intensely in the UK—the question of demonstrable marketing and bookselling impact grows only more pressing. More on the Baillie Gifford Prize administration’s decision to take this step is here.
Nothing here is meant to demean either the programs behind the contests, nor their juries and contestants. The problem is that without showing any hint of what good they can do for sales in a teeming marketplace, they leave themselves without any actual touchstone of hard value that might indicate their ability to raise the profile of good literature for the industry at large and for the authors and publishers producing these books.
And here is the newly released shortlist for the Welsh competition.
The 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlist
- Seán Hewitt, Rapture’s Road (Penguin Random House / Jonathon Cape / Vintage) – poetry collection (British-Irish)
- Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits (Penguin Random House / Fig Tree) – novel (Irish)
- Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Penguin Random House UK / Viking) – novel (Dutch)
- Rebecca Watson, I Will Crash (Faber & Faber) – novel (British)
- Eley Williams, Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good (HarperCollins / 4th Estate) – short story collection (British)
- Yasmin Zaher, The Coin (Bonnier / Footnote Press) – novel (Palestinian)
This year’s jury comprises Daniel Williams of Swansea University; authors Jan Carson and Mary Jean Chan; and literary critic Max Liu. Once again, the author Namita Gokkhale chairs the panel.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize is here. And more on world literary and publishing awards is here.