MS: Five women dominate the six-strong Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist

Good work Caroline Bird! As those who read my earlier posts will surely know, I am a big fan of this young, imaginative British poet who has previously been shortlisted for this very prize, and she is still ONLY 23. Gosh! Watering Can is fab, mind. I’ve reread it only this week. There are many poems that I like inside the covers. Poems like ‘Last Tuesday’, ‘Wedding Guest’, ‘Closet Affair’ and ‘Blame the Poodle’. Poems like ‘Road-Signs’:

‘You were travelling a grey motorway.
You had your baby in your lap
with enormous green eyes
and a scarily large head.
You parked the car in a lay-by, sat on the roof,
held her high like a trophy,
joked, ‘One day all of this will be yours.’

I am also looking forward to ploughing through the other titles on the shortlist before December’s winner is announced.

Emily Mackie

The ‘most diverse shortlist to date’ for the £30,000 Prize, which is now awarded annually to talented writers under the age of 30, has revealed a six-strong shortlist from a longlist of 16, five of whom are female. The writers hail from five continents, and the six works consist of two poetry collections and four novels, covering topics from war and family to love and betrayal. Joining Caroline Bird in the running will be Somalian writer Nadifa Mohamed; The Rehearsal author Eleanor Catton, American poet Elyse Fenton; andEmily Mackie, who currently resides in Bristol. Debut novelist Karan Mahajan completes the list with Family Planning.

Dylan Thomas Prize founder and member of the judging panel, Professor Peter Stead, commented: ‘As a panel, we were both pleased and surprised to see that the final six were predominately female writers, as there was a fairly even spread on the longlist. Regardless of gender, this is an outstanding shortlist that, in my opinion, rivals that of the world’s best-known literary awards.’

The winner will be announced at the final awards ceremony at Brangwyn Hall in Swansea, Wales on December 1st, 2010.

Comments

The More Than Human Perspective in Environmental Poetry: A Poem and Interview with Susie Wild

Interview by Zoë Brigley Welcome back to our series on writing the #MoreThanHuman. We offer a set of interviews with poets and writers on how they approach writing about the environment. The more-than-human is a phrase that seeks to side-step traditional nature-culture dualisms and draw attention to the unity of all life as a kind of shared commonwealth existing on a fragile planet. It also reminds us humans that there is more to life, that there is more world, than the human. It relocates us in relation to the mystery. This week we meet Susie Wild , author of the poetry collections Windfalls and Better Houses , the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals . She tells us she lives in Rhondda Fach “with a TBR pile almost as high as Llanwonno”.

Wales Book of the Year Shortlist 2025: Little Universe

We're absolutely delighted for Natalie Ann Holborow , today shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2025 for her third poetry collection, the stellar Little Universe . Thanks to all the judges and huge congratulations to all the other wonderful writers on the shortlist! If you'd like to get involved, you can vote for your favourite book on the shortlist. ‘Poems of true wonder, mystery composed with precision. Natalie Ann Holborow is a custodian of beauty in the ordinary and the fragility of experience. The lyric moments of her Little Universe made me lift my eyes from the page and consult the stars.’ – Oliver James Lomax ' Little Universe presents an intense voyage through a recognisable Welsh landscape of family, hospital wards, homes, beaches, love, and new life. The poems encompass mythology, the joys of the everyday and the personal inevitability of illness and grief. This is a poetry acutely aware of the specificity of vocabulary and of the unconstrained p...

Wildlife

Search This Blog