Derrick Owusu and Sean Hewitt have been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award | books

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

Harriet Armstrong, Colwell-Brown, Sacha Debevec-McKinney and Susannah Evans have also been shortlisted for the £20,000 prize, which celebrates fiction in any form – including novels, short stories, poetry and drama – by writers aged 39 or under, in honor of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

Author and head of the judging panel, Erinosun Okojie, said the “stimulating” shortlisted books, which comprise four novels and two poetry collections, “have profound things to say about the ways we live and what it means to be human.”

Two of the six authors shortlisted for the award have previously been nominated. British-Irish poet and memoirist Hewitt, nominated in 2025 for his poetry collection, Rapture Road, has been selected again for his debut novel, Open, Heaven – a portrait of first gay love, which Sarah Berry in The Guardian described as “a tender, deft and demonstrative work”.

Owusu, shortlisted for the 2023 prize, has been shortlisted for Borderline Fiction, which follows a young black man navigating a series of relationships and coming to terms with mental health difficulties. Praised as “painfully moving” by The Guardian, it is his third novel.

Armstrong, the youngest author on the shortlist at just 25 years old, is competing with To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, a darkly comedic college novel that grapples with gender relations and Generation Z’s mental health, in which Armstrong “expertly points out the emotional intensity and vulnerability of first love,” according to Guardian reviewer Judd Cook.

Brown is also best known for her debut novel, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, about three working-class girls growing up in Doncaster, and set between the late 1990s and 2015. Katherine Taylor wrote in The Guardian that Brown’s novel “seems essential… You probably won’t read anything else like it this year.”

Both shortlisted collections of poetry come from debut authors: American poet Debevick McKinney, whose novel Joy is My Middle Name addresses themes of gender, race, addiction, and popular culture; and Bristol-based Evans, whose book Under the Blue offers a meditation on the lived reality of care.

The six-film shortlist was selected from a long list of 12 films, which also included Chaotic Good by Isabel Pavey, What Remains After a Fire by Kanza Javed, The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, Absence by Issa Quincey, Gunk by Saba Sams and Make a Home of Me by Vanessa Santos.

Joining Okogie on the judging panel are writers Joe Dunthorne, Neddy Zack/Aria Ebi, Prajwal Parajuli, and Eli Williams.

Last year’s award was given to Palestinian writer Yasmine Zaher for her novel The Currency, and previous winners include Caleb Azuma Nelson, Arinze Ifekandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Brian Washington, Fiona MacFarlane, and Kayo Chingoni.

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