The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize is proud to announce its 2025 shortlist.
“The range and depth of this year's vibrant longlist made for compelling reading. It was truly a challenge for the jury to hone in on the final shortlist. The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize celebrates immensely talented writers, all below the age of forty, writing in a range of literary forms. The 2025 shortlist is varied and diverse: from ancient Sicily to tremulous nightwoods, it encompasses the historical, the contemporary, and the timeless through novels, short stories and poetry, showcasing startlingly fresh writing, style and energy.” - Namita Gokhale, Chair of Judges
Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape (Vintage, Penguin Random House))
In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland
'Points to a bright future for Irish poetry' SUNDAY TIMES
'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTER
As the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.
Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.
A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.
Seán Hewitt, Rapture’s Road (Jonathan Cape (Vintage, Penguin Random House))
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
X: @seanehewitt | Instagram: @seanehewitt
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House)
Ancient Sicily. Enter GELON: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter LAMPO: lovesick, jobless, in need of a distraction.
Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads.
They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food.
And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.
It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of.
What could possibly go wrong?
Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House)
Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. A Sunday Times bestseller, it was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son. [Photo credit: Conor Horgan]
Instagram: @ferdialennon
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking, Penguin Random House)
It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep - as a guest, there to stay for the season…
In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.
Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Viking, Penguin Random House UK)
Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher. She currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank", has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. The Safekeep is her debut novel and was acquired in hotly-contested nine-way auctions in both the UK and the US. Rights have sold in a further twelve countries. The Safekeep was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024. [Photo credit: Roosmarijn Broersen]
Instagram: @yaelwouden | Website: www.yaelvanderwouden.com
I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson (Faber & Faber)
It was a peace offering, I knew that
you don’t appear on someone’s doorstep uninvited, saying Alright
unless you want to make amends
It’s been six years since Rosa last saw her brother. Six years since they last spoke. Six years since they last fought. Six years since she gave up on the idea of having a brother.
She’s spent that time carefully not thinking about him. Not remembering their childhood. Not mentioning those stories, even to the people she loves.
Now the distance she had so carefully put between them has collapsed. Can she find a way to make peace – to forgive, to be forgiven – when the past she’s worked so hard to contain threatens to spill over into the present?
From the acclaimed author of little scratch, this is a moving, powerfully honest novel about how we love, how we grieve and how we forgive.
Rebecca Watson, I Will Crash (Faber & Faber)
Rebecca Watson is the author of little scratch, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. She is one of the Observer's 10 best debut novelists of 2021. Her work has been published in the TLS, the Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. She works part-time as Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times and lives in London. [Photo credit: Alice Zoo]
X: @rebeccawhatsun | Instagram: @rebeccawhatsun
Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams (4th Estate)
Granta Best Young British novelist and acclaimed author of Attrib. and other stories, Eley Williams returns with a thrilling collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient – from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long.
A courtroom sketch artist delights in committing portraits of their lover to paper but their need to capture likenesses forever is revealed to have darker, more complex intentions. A child’s schoolyard crush on a saint marks a confrontation with the reality of a teenage body in flux. Elsewhere, an editor of canned laughter loses their confidence and seeks divine intervention, and an essayist annotates their thoughts on Keats by way of internet-gleaned sex tips.
Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good hums with fossicking language and ingenious experiments in form and considers notions of playfulness, authenticity and care as it holds relationships to account: their sweet misunderstandings, soured reflections, queer wish fulfilments and shared, held breaths.
Eley Williams, Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good (4th Estate)
Eley Williams' collection Attrib. and Other Stories (2017) was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her novel The Liar's Dictionary won a 2021 Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and listed as a Guardian Book of the Year. In 2023, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Her writing is published in several journals and anthologies, with stories and serialised fiction also commissioned by Radio 4. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [Photo credit: Alice Zoo]
Instagram: @eleywilliams
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Footnote Press)
A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman’s unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind.
The Coin‘s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.
In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags.
But America is stifling her – her wilfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness and the narrator unravels spectacularly.
In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging – all while resisting easy moralising. Provocative, wry and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.
Yasmin Zaher, The Coin (Footnote Press)
Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer born in 1991 in Jerusalem. The Coin is her first novel. [Photo credit: Willy Somma]
What the judges say
Namita Gokhale on Rapture's Road by Seán Hewitt:
“In Rapture’s Road, Sean Hewitt’s moving work spoke to me through the sure tread of the verses and their tremulous shadows. This is poetry that believes in beauty and the power of words. These luminous nightscapes , haunted by love and loss, carry the assurance of rigorous craft.”
Max Liu on Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon:
"Ferdia Lennon’s first novel signals the arrival of an assured and ambitious voice in contemporary fiction. By combining an ancient setting with a contemporary idiom, he puts a fresh spin on the historical novel, telling his characters’ story with ceaseless energy and inventiveness. The judges agreed that it is funny, moving and delivers a message about the importance of art that could not be more timely."
Mary Jean Chan on The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden:
“The Safekeep is a meticulously plotted debut which manages to hold its final plot twist at bay until the true reason for Eva’s presence in Isabel's life is finally revealed. This is a historical novel which feels urgent and contemporary in terms of its central concerns about power, autonomy and desire. Van der Wouden’s writing is deeply evocative, perceptive and beautifully precise.”
Jan Carson on I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson:
“I Will Crash is a startling piece of writing which takes a fresh and oftentimes disarming look at the age old themes of trauma, grief and familial discord. Watson’s masterful use of form and white space creates an immersive reading experience which invites the reader deep into the unsettling heart of the story. We were particularly taken with the unique style of this book.”
Professor Daniel Williams on Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams:
“I was intrigued by the diversity and imaginative range of the stories collected in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good. Whether describing a courtroom artist on a blind date, a broadcaster meditating on the accidents of life while reading the shipping forecast, or a child’s response to a serious domestic accident, Eley Williams takes an exuberant delight in the unexpected, comic and sometimes disturbing ways in which words can convey - and withhold - meaning.”
Jan Carson on The Coin by Yasmin Zaher:
“The Coin defied all our expectations. From the first page, we were captivated by Zaher’s oddly obsessive, occasionally infuriating and always intriguing protagonist. We especially loved Zaher’s elegantly concise writing and her ability to surprise us with a plot which feels at one time utterly believable and simultaneously gloriously unhinged.”
