Tag: International Dylan Thomas Prize
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A new Beckett? Yasmin Zaher’s ‘The Coin’ and dispossession
Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin (Footnote Press, 2024) was praised by the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize jury for ‘dissect[ing] nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging in a vivid exploration of identity and heritage’.1 It was the jury’s unanimous choice. In its depiction of the narrator’s life in New York, the city…
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Surviving solitude in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s ‘Small Worlds’
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds is a celebration of love, music, and community. Through jazz, dance, and shared experiences, the novel explores the beauty of connection and the pain of isolation. With lyrical prose, Nelson reminds us that to be ‘open’ is to be free—and that small worlds sustain us.
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Language and the queer journey in Arinze Ifeakandu’s ‘God’s Children Are Little Broken Things’
Arinze Ifeakandu‘s God’s Children Are Little Broken Things (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2022) won the International Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. It’s a collection of nine short stories set in Nigeria—in Abuja and Kano, mostly—all of which have male queer stories at the heart. In none of the stories is being queer straightforward. Sometimes the difficulties…
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Archiving grief: Patricia Lockwood’s ‘No One Is Talking About This’
Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury, 2021) won last year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, and was cited especially for its depiction of the Internet. In the book, the ‘portal’ is a virtual world that can provide access to ‘everywhere’, but is a largely desensitised space; it is where the protagonist spends…
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Top 5 blogs of 2020
The new year will soon be heralded by new blogs from me. But for now, here’s a list of my Top 5 blogs of 2020 according to views. Apart from anything else, the list provides an interesting snapshot of last year’s popular and thought-provoking books … Enjoy, and thanks for reading this blog in 2020!…
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(Post-)postmodernist elegy: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Stephen Sexton’s If All The World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019) has proven phenomenally successful, having won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and being shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. And yet, it is not an easy poetry collection, proving both difficult in terms of its style and allusive references, and…