Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt shortlisted for Dylan Thomas prize

Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt are among six writers named on this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize shortlist. Harriet Armstrong, Colwill Brown, Sasha Debevec-McKenney and Suzannah V Evans complete the line-up for the £20,000 award, which celebrates fiction in any form — novels, short stories, poetry and drama — by writers aged 39 or under, in honour of Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

The list comprises four novels and two poetry collections. Judging panel chair Irenosen Okojie called the “galvanising” shortlist “have profound things to say about the ways we live and what it means to be human”. Hewitt, previously nominated in 2025 for his poetry collection Rapture’s Road, is shortlisted again for his debut novel Open, Heaven, a portrait of gay first love that Sarah Perry described as a “tender, skilled and epiphanic work”.

Owusu, a 2023 nominee, is up for Borderline Fiction, a story of a young Black man navigating relationships and mental health that has been called “disarmingly poignant”.

derek owusu, seán hewitt, swansea university, dylan thomas, borderline fiction, open, heaven, harriet armstrong, colwill brown, sasha debevec-mckenney, poetry