Eley Williams, Yael van der Wouden and Ferdia Lennon are among the young writers shortlisted for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Seán Hewitt, Yasmin Zaher and Rebecca Watson also made the shortlist for the £20,000 award, which celebrates fiction in any form – including novels, short stories, poetry and drama – by writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

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Dylan Thomas prize shortlist 2025

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The “varied and diverse” shortlist “encompasses the historical, the contemporary, and the timeless” and showcases “startlingly fresh writing, style and energy”, said writer and judging chair Namita Gokhale.

Williams was chosen for Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good – the only short story collection on the list. In the “concise masterpiece” of the title story, the announcer of the shipping forecast considers its significance to listeners, wrote Sarah Crown in her Guardian review.

Van der Wouden made the shortlist for The Safekeep, which was also shortlisted for the 2024 Booker and is on the longlist for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. The novel explores the postwar treatment of Jews in the Netherlands through a family drama. “This is an impressive debut,” wrote Rachel Seiffert in her Guardian review. “She creates and sustains atmospheres deftly, and ultimately delivers a thrilling story.”

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Lennon was picked for his novel Glorious Exploits, which won the Waterstones debut fiction prize last summer. Set in Syracuse in 412BC in the aftermath of Athens’ failed invasion of Sicily, the story follows two potters who decide to stage an adaptation of Medea in a quarry where Athenian soldiers are held captive, using the prisoners as actors.

Hewitt’s Rapture’s Road, which explores love and loss, is the only poetry collection on this year’s shortlist. “Hewitt’s poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals”, wrote Kate Kellaway in the Observer.

Watson was shortlisted for I Will Crash, a novel narrated by a woman dealing with the death of her abusive brother. Completing the shortlist is Zaher’s The Coin, about a wealthy Palestinian woman who gets involved in a pyramid scheme reselling designer Birkin bags.

The six-strong shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 12, which also featured Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha, Mrs Jekyll by Emma Glass, The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya, Pity by Andrew McMillan, Monstrum by Lottie Mills, and The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao.

The winner will be announced on 15 May at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace. Joining Gokhale on the judging panel are writer Jan Carson, poet Mary Jean Chan, critic Max Liu and academic Daniel Williams.

Past winners of the prize include Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter and Arinze Ifeakandu. Last year, Caleb Azumah Nelson won the award for his second novel, Small Worlds.

Ferdia Lennon has been awarded the 2024 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, which means a pig will be named after his winning novel, Glorious Exploits.

The prize, set up in 2000, seeks to recognise the funniest new novels that best evoke the spirit of PG Wodehouse’s work. As well as the chance to name a gloucestershire old spots pig, the winner receives a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and a complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection.

Lennon said he was both “stunned and utterly delighted” to have won. The Norwich-based author joked that “For Samuel Beckett, the act of writing was the placing of stains on silence and nothingness. For me, it has always been more of a means to secure pig-naming rights.”

Set in Syracuse in 412BC, in the aftermath of Athens’ failed invasion of Sicily, Glorious Exploits is about two potters who decide to put on a production of Medea in a quarry where Athenian soldiers are held captive, using the prisoners as actors.

Chair of judges, Hay festival co-founder Peter Florence, described Lennon’s novel as “a delightful mash of contemporary Irish comedy and classical Athenian tragedy”.

He said he and his fellow judges, David Campbell, publisher at Everyman’s Library, comedians Pippa Evans and Sindhu Vee, broadcaster and author James Naughtie and Justin Albert, vice-chair of the University of Wales, were “all laughing and cheering Lennon’s comic spirit”.

Lennon was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and Libyan father and holds a BA in history and classics from University College Dublin and an MA in prose fiction from the University of East Anglia. “My fascination for ancient Greece began as a child,” he told the Guardian when Glorious Exploits won the Waterstones debut fiction prize in July. “However, not being personally acquainted with any gods or mythical heroes, I decided to tell my novel from the perspective of two ordinary lads with a love of story.”

Up against Lennon’s novel on the Bollinger prize shortlist were A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray, Good Material by Dolly Alderton, High Vaultage by Chris Sugden and Jen Sugden, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue and You Are Here by David Nicholls.

Previous winners have included Percival Everett, Helen Fielding and Terry Pratchett. Last year, Bob Mortimer won for his novel The Satsuma Complex.

Ferdia Lennon, 36, was born and raised in Dublin. His first novel, Glorious Exploits, set in ancient Sicily, was the winner of this year’s Waterstones debut fiction prize. It follows two jobless potters who decide to co-direct a play performed by Athenian prisoners of war. The New York Times called it “a comic riff on Greek tragedy, with an Irish accent”; for Roddy Doyle, it’s a tale of “modern-day Dubliners living among ancient Greeks”. Lennon spoke from his home in Norwich.

Tell us where this novel began.
I’ve been fascinated by ancient Greece since I was a kid. Then I read History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, a chronicle of the 27-year war between Athens and Sparta, which spilled out across the Mediterranean world. Athens launched this unprovoked invasion of Sicily, primarily against Syracuse, the main power. They thought: “We’ll be done in a few months and it’ll help us win in Greece.” It ends up with thousands of Athenian prisoners being flung into a quarry outside the city of Syracuse. I knew I wanted to write about that, but didn’t yet know my angle. Then a couple of years later, I was reading Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, where he describes how some of those defeated Athenians survived by quoting lines from Euripides, the most popular dramatist amongst the Sicilians. I thought, OK, that’s my story: who were these Syracusans who left Athenian prisoners to die in this open-air pit, yet were so fascinated by their drama that they’re willing to save them in exchange for these precious lines?

What led you to centre the action on two unemployed friends?
Some of my favourite books and films are about friendship: Don Quixote, Withnail & I… Starving Athenians in a quarry in 412BCE is completely beyond the pale of what people are familiar with, but you can ground it in a friendship that people will understand. Most people have experienced that sense of their life not necessarily going quite the way that they’d hoped, some unrealised or unfulfilled ambitions.

Why did you write it in a Dublin voice?
Why not? I’m not going to write in an ancient Greek or fifth-century BC Syracusan dialect. There’s always a decision about which version of English to use. At first I was thinking: this is coming out quite Irish, do I pull back or double down? For me, it made sense to double down. I was tired of ancient Greek or Roman characters sounding as if they’ve stepped out of a Merchant Ivory production. Sicily had been colonised by mainland Greece: it made sense to me that the Greek they speak would be a bit different, the way Hiberno-English is a bit different. And Syracuse is the biggest city in Sicily, so the Dublin voice made sense. The Greek world wasn’t a monoculture: you’ve got different dialects, different classes, immigration, a massive slave trade. The language was a way to try to capture some of that difference.

Have you ever been involved in theatre?
No, my only performance has been as Frankenstein in a London Dungeon knock-off – I lasted about a couple of hours! I lived in Paris for a while and had friends who ran an amateur theatre group. I’d watch their rehearsals but never actually acted myself. I love cinema, though. As a kid my older brother was really into films, so we just had exposure to things you wouldn’t normally see at a young age: Kubrick, Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, who I love. Watching spaghetti westerns helped me indirectly with this book.

How did you first get interested in history?
I think I just liked good stories. Early on at school we had this textbook called Footprints and the interesting thing was that the early sections were versions of Irish myths and then as it went on it became straight-up history. It didn’t differentiate between them: like, chapter one was about Cú Chulainn, who’s one of the key Irish mythic heroes, then chapter 10 was about Kennedy! But maybe at some level that made a link between myth and narrative and history.

How do you explain the current wave of successful Irish novelists?
I remember that when I was a student, James Joyce’s house was five minutes up the road: just seeing that plaque, there’s something nice about having that literary history celebrated around you. On a practical level, the structures in Ireland make it easier for writers. An Arts Council grant helped me write this book. I wasn’t in any way established, but you could submit a work in progress to a panel of your peers and if you’re lucky, you might get money that will give you a couple of months that could be the break. I feel part of the burgeoning moment in Irish literature has to do with the financial crash. A whole generation was devastated, in Ireland maybe more than most. There were no jobs, so you felt freer to do what you wanted, even if it made no money; I started writing in Granada [in Spain] while unemployed.

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Ferdia Lennon has won this year’s Waterstones debut fiction prize for his “riotous, exuberant treat of a novel”, Glorious Exploits.

The novel, which took about seven years to write, is set in Syracuse in 412BC, in the aftermath of Athens’ failed invasion of Sicily. It follows two locals who decide to stage an adaptation of Medea in a quarry where Athenian soldiers are held captive, using the prisoners as actors.

Lennon was announced as the winner at a ceremony in the Waterstones’ Piccadilly branch in London on Thursday evening. He receives £5,000 and the “promise of ongoing commitment” to his career.

“Lennon brings the ancient world to life in Technicolor, from the horrors of war to the moments of hilarity to be found in the mundane, with a charmingly eccentric cast of characters,” said Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones.

Lennon was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Libyan father, and studied history and classics at University College Dublin and prose fiction at the University of East Anglia. He now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.

“My fascination for ancient Greece began as a child,” said Lennon. “However, not being personally acquainted with any gods or mythical heroes, I decided to tell my novel from the perspective of two ordinary lads with a love of story.

“It had always struck me that ancient Greek comedy, such as that of Aristophanes, has something of the ribald, irreverent humour I grew up with in Dublin and that blending this with the universal themes of classical tragedy would be one way to evoke a living breathing ancient world that felt contemporary.”

Lennon said that inspiration for the plot came from a “chance discovery of a line from Plutarch, where we learn that Athenian prisoners of war survived by quoting lines from Euripides’ plays to their Sicilian captors”.

In a Guardian review of the novel, AK Blakemore wrote: “[It]clips along in a tidy prose judiciously filigreed with some lovely image-making and the odd Homeric epithet: the sun is ‘white and fat like a gluttonous star’, the skin on a worker’s fingers puckers ‘like curdled milk’, an actor’s hands twist in the air ‘like strange flowers in a storm’.”

Shortlisted alongside Glorious Exploits were Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, The Silence In Between by Josie Ferguson, Mongrel by Hanako Footman and Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly.

Glorious Exploits “is a riotous, exuberant treat of a novel, which celebrates the redemptive power of art, and the catharsis to be found in storytelling,” said Carvalho. “A masterclass in tragicomedy, firmly rooted in classical tradition and yet strikingly, unapologetically new, Glorious Exploits is madly ambitious and devastatingly affecting, but above all pure page-turning joy from start to finish.”

The prize is open to debut fiction of all genres, and the winner is chosen by a panel of Waterstones booksellers. It launched in 2022, and Tess Gunty was the inaugural winner with The Rabbit Hutch. Last year, Alice Winn won the prize for her novel In Memoriam.

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Penguin Books Ltd, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.