2023 Dylan Thomas Prize longlist: 12 authors, aged 39 and younger, compete for £20,000 cash prize

The annual Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize was initiated in 2006. It is one of the world’s most prestigious awards for young writers that aims to encourage new talents. The award is presented to a published literary work in the English language written by an author aged 39 or under. The Prize is open to writers from every part of the world and open to the genres of poetry, novels, short stories, and drama. The winner will receive a cash prize of £20,000.

Authors from the UK, Ireland, Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia, Lebanon, and Australia, have made to this year’s longlist. Of the 12 longlisted authors, six are debutants and eight are women. African diaspora and women authors have dominated the longlist.

The 2023 jury is chaired by Di Speirs (Book Editor, BBC Audio) and comprises authors Prajwal Parajuly, Rachel Long, Jon Gower, and Maggie Shipstead.

The shortlist of six will be announced on March 23 and the winner on May 11.

The longlist for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize is:

Limberlost, Robbie Arnott

Ned West dreams of sailing across the river on a boat of his very own. To Ned, a boat means freedom – the fresh open water, squid-rich reefs, fires on private beaches – a far cry from life on Limberlost, the family farm, where his father worries and grieves for Ned’s older brothers. They’re away fighting in a ruthless and distant war, becoming men on the battlefield, while Ned – too young to enlist – roams the land in search of rabbits to shoot, selling their pelts to fund his secret boat ambitions.

But as the seasons pass and Ned grows up, real life gets in the way. Ned falls for Callie, the tough, capable sister of his best friend, and together they learn the lessons of love, loss, and hardship. When a storm decimates the Limberlost crop and shakes the orchard’s future, Ned must decide what to protect: his childhood dreams, or the people and the land that surround him.

At turns tender and vicious, Limberlost is a tale of the masculinities we inherit, the limits of ownership and understanding, and the teeming, vibrant wonders of growing up.

Seven Steeples, Sara Baume

It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another – one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they’ve drifted.

They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up to appraise the view. A mountain gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic, “as if it had accumulated stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards.” They make a promise to climb the mountain, but – over the course of the next seven years – it remains un-climbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes.

Seven Steeples is a beautiful and profound exploration of the nature of love, and the resilience of nature.

God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, Arinze Ifeakandu

A man revisits the university campus where he lost his first love, aware now of what he couldn’t understand then. A daughter returns home to Lagos after the death of her father, where she must face her past – and future – relationship with his longtime partner. A young musician rises to fame at the risk of losing himself and the man who loves him.

Generations collide, families break and are remade, languages and cultures intertwine, and lovers find their ways to futures; from childhood through adulthood; on university campuses, city centres, and neighbourhoods where church bells mingle with the morning call to prayer.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Maddie Mortimer

Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia’s body, learning her life from the inside out. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. It’s travelling down the banks of her canals. It’s spreading.

When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia’s world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. Deeply buried secrets stir awake. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, and the landscape around becomes indistinguishable from the one within, Lia and her family are faced with some of the hardest questions of all: how can we move on from the events that have shaped us, when our bodies harbour everything? And what does it mean to die with grace, when you’re simply not ready to let go?

Phantom Gang, Ciarán O’Rourke

With lyric grace and meditative clarity, Phantom Gang offers a daring dissection of civilisational violence in a variety of contexts – from the intimate atavisms and inequalities of Irish history to the insidious growth of the global Big Tech economy in the present day – alongside deep, sensually delicate explorations of broken love and salvaged memories.

Honouring the work of a range of writers and photographers, including John Clare (1793-1864), Martín Chambi (1891-1973), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and Gerda Taro (1910-1937), these poems unsettle the boundaries between past and present, elegy and tribute, folkloric remembrance and political reportage, interweaving each with all to create a compelling vision of a world in motion and a consciousness alive to change – as spectral voices and still-living presences seep “into the open echo-chamber / of poetry”, casting light on the inner and outer landscapes of the poet’s life in time.

Things They Lost, Okwiri Oduor

Set in the fictional Kenyan town of Mapeli, Things They Lost tells the story of four generations of women, each haunted by the mysterious curse that hangs over the Brown family. At the heart of the novel is Ayosa Ataraxis Brown, 12 years old and the loneliest girl in the world.

This debut novel weaves in Kenyan folklore and myth as it traces Ayosa’s fragile, toxic relationship with Nabumbo Promise, her mysterious and beguiling mother who comes and goes like tumbleweed: lost, but not quite gone.

Losing the Plot, Derek Owusu

Driven by a deep-seated desire to understand his mother’s life before he was born, Derek Owusu offers a powerful imagining of her journey. As she moves from Ghana to the UK and navigates parenthood in a strange and often lonely environment, the effects of displacement are felt across generations.

Told through the eyes of both mother and son, in Losing the Plot Owusu experiments with form to piece together the immigrant experience and explore how the stories we share and tell ourselves are just as vital as the ones we don’t.

I’m a Fan, Sheena Patel

In I’m A Fan single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, in turn offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal heteronormative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.

Send Nudes, Saba Sams

In ten dazzling stories, Saba Sams dives into the world of girlhood and immerses us in its contradictions and complexities: growing up too quickly, yet not quickly enough; taking possession of what one can, while being taken possession of; succumbing to societal pressure but also orchestrating that pressure. These young women are feral yet attentive, fierce yet vulnerable, exploited yet exploitative.

Threading between clubs at closing time, pub toilets, drenched music festivals and beach holidays, these unforgettable short stories deftly chart the treacherous terrain of growing up – of intense friendships, of ambivalent mothers, of uneasily blended families, and of learning to truly live in your own body.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, Warsan Shire

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls.

Briefly, A Delicious Life, Nell Stevens

In 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca. They are there to create and to convalesce, to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris days.

Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who has been at the monastery for over 300 years. Blanca’s was a life cut short and she is outraged. Having lived in a world full, according to her mother, of “beautiful men,” she has found that in death it is the women she falls for, their beauty she cannot turn away from, and it is the women and girls who, over her centuries in the village and at the monastery, she has sought to protect from the attentions of men with what little power she has. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man’s clothes, and Blanca is in love.

But the rest of the village is suspicious of the newcomers, and as winter sets in, as George tries to keep her family and herself from falling apart, as Chopin writes prelude after prelude in despair on his tuneless piano, their stay looks likely to end in disaster.

No Land to Light On, Yara Zgheib

Boston, 2017: When Hadi returns to his heavily pregnant partner Sama after a trip to Jordan to bury his father, he is stopped at border control – a hostile new immigration law has just been enacted – while she awaits him on the other side.

Worlds apart, suspended between hope and disillusion as hours become days become weeks, Sama and Hadi yearn for a way back to each other, and to the life they’d dreamed up together. But does that life exist any more, or was it only an illusion?

No Land to Light On is the story of a family caught up in forces beyond their control, fighting for the freedom and home they found in one another.