The administrators of the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize announced on Tuesday the six finalists for the international award, including poets and fiction writers from England, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Vietnam. The winner of the biennial prize, given to writers under the age of thirty for work in any genre written in English, will receive £60,000 (approximately $119,768).
The finalists are:
Trouble Came to the Turnip (Carcanet Press) by Caroline Bird
Blood Kin (Viking) by Ceridwen Dovey
Blackmoor (Simon & Schuster) by Edward Hogan
The Boat (Knopf) by Nam Le
Children of the Revolution (Jonathan Cape) by Dinaw Mengestu
God’s Own Country (Viking) by Ross Raisin
“The prize honors one of the greatest and most youthful twentieth-century talents, so the bar is set very high,” said Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival in Wales and chair of judges, in a press release. “We are confident that this will be a vintage year that may produce a winner worthy of Dylan Thomas." Thomas published his first collection of poetry, 18 Poems (Fortune Press, 1934), at the age of twenty.
The winner of the prize, sponsored by the University of Wales, will be announced in November at a ceremony in Thomas's home city of Swansea.
