The Dylan Thomas Prize is back this year again and two sterling African writers have made its longlist: Ayòbámi Adébáyò for A Spell of Good Things; and Caleb Azumah Nelson for Small Worlds. Ayòbámi Adébáyò was previously longlisted in 2018 for her debut Stay With Me and Caleb Azumah Nelson was shortlisted in 2022 for his debut Open Water. For their longlisted works this year, the theme of familial bonds is dominant. While Nigerian author Adébáyò’s A Spell of Good Things ferries us “to modern-day Nigeria, to tell the timeless tale of two families caught between the gaping divides in society,” British-Ghanaian author Caleb Nelson “bridges the distance between Ghana and London, to tell a complex father-son story set across three summers in his intimate novel.”
Other works on the longlist includes:
- The Glutton by A. K. Blakemore (Granta) – novel (England, UK)
- Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber) – poetry collection (Hong Kong)
- Penance by Eliza Clark (Faber & Faber) – novel (England, UK)
- The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova (Atlantic Books) – short story collection (Canada)
- Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein (Bloomsbury Publishing UK/Ecco, HarperCollins US) – novel (Trinidad and Tobago)
- Local Fires by Joshua Jones (Parthian Books) – short story collection (Wales, UK)
- Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (Granta) – novel (US)
- Close to Home by Michael Magee (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House UK) – novel (Northern Ireland, UK)
- Open Up by Thomas Morris (Faber & Faber) – short story collection (Wales, UK)
- Divisible by Itself and One by Kae Tempest (Picador, Pan Macmillan) – poetry collection (England, UK)
Namita Gokhale, acclaimed author of 23 books – including the forthcoming Never Never Land – and co-founder and co-director of the famed Jaipur Literature Festival, chairs the panel of judges this year. He will be joined by Jon Gower, prize-winning Welsh author and lecturer in Creative Writing at Swansea University; Seán Hewitt, winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022 and Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin; Julia Wheeler, former BBC Gulf Correspondent and author of Telling Tales: An Oral History of Dubai; and Tice Cin, interdisciplinary artist and author of Keeping the House, longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize in 2022. Together, they would whittle the longlist down to a strong shortlist of six, set to be announced on Thursday 21 March.
The Dylan Thomas Prize was established in 2006. It awards £20,000 to the ‘best published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under’; it celebrates fiction in all its forms, including poetry, novels, short stories, and drama.
Last year’s prize was awarded to Arinze Ifeakandu for his debut short story collection God’s Children Are Little Broken Things (Orion, Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
Goodluck to Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Caleb Azumah Nelson.
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