Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt shortlisted for Dylan Thomas prize

Six writers are now finalists for the prestigious annual prize, which awards £20,000 to a writer aged 39 or under

Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Harriet Armstrong, Colwill Brown, Sasha Debevec-McKenney and Suzannah V Evans also made the shortlist for the £20,000 award, which celebrates fiction in any form – including novels, short stories, poetry and drama – by writers aged 39 or under, in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

Comprising four novels and two poetry collections, the books on the “galvanising” shortlist “have profound things to say about the ways we live and what it means to be human”, said author and judging panel chair, Irenosen Okojie.

Two of the six shortlisted authors have previously been nominated for the award. British-Irish poet and memoirist Hewitt, nominated in 2025 for his poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, has been chosen again for his debut novel, Open, Heaven – a portrait of gay first love, described in the Guardian by Sarah Perry as a “tender, skilled and epiphanic work”.

Owusu, a 2023 prize nominee, is shortlisted for Borderline Fiction, which follows a young black man navigating a series of relationships and coming to terms with mental health difficulties. Praised in the Guardian as “disarmingly poignant”, it is his third novel.

Armstrong, the youngest shortlisted author at just 25, is in the running with To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, a darkly comic campus novel grappling with gen Z gender relations and mental health, in which Armstrong “expertly adumbrates the emotional intensity and vulnerability of first love”, according to Guardian reviewer Jude Cook.

Brown, too, is recognised for her debut novel, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, about three working-class girls growing up in Doncaster, set between the late 90s and 2015. Brown’s novel “feels essential … you will probably read nothing else like it this year”, wrote Catherine Taylor in the Guardian.

Both poetry collections on the shortlist come from debut authors: American poet Debevec-McKenney, whose Joy is My Middle Name engages with themes of sex, race, addiction and pop culture; and Bristol-based Evans, whose Under the Blue offers a meditation on the lived realities of care.

The six-strong shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 12, which also featured Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi, What Remains After a Fire by Kanza Javed, The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, Absence by Issa Quincy, Gunk by Saba Sams and Make a Home of Me by Vanessa Santos.

Joining Okojie on the judging panel are the writers Joe Dunthorne, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Prajwal Parajuly and Eley Williams.

Last year’s prize was awarded to Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher for her novel The Coin, and previous winners include Caleb Azumah Nelson, Arinze Ifeakandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Fiona McFarlane and Kayo Chingonyi.

The winner will be announced on 14 May at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.