Australian Author Wins 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize

Vietnamese-Australian Writer Nam Le wins Prestigious Literary Award

Nov 11, 2008

Vietnamese-Australian author Nam Le has captured international attention with his best-selling collection of short stories.

The international critical acclaim for Australian author Nam Le has been further enhanced by his success in winning the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers.

Born in Vietnam and raised in Australia since infancy, acclaimed author Nam Le has gained significant attention in Australia and internationally for The Boat (Hamish Hamilton, 2008), a collection of short stories.

Le has received a variety of awards including the Pushcart Prize and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. He has also received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the University of East Anglia.

The Boat has attracted significant attention for the current fiction editor of the Harvard Review, including the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” Fiction Selection for 2008 and places on several best-sellers lists internationally. It has already been translated into several languages.

With the first and last stories of the collection reflecting Le’s family experience in leaving Vietnam to travel to Australia, The Boat contains stories set around the world focusing on the lives of characters as diverse as a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit-man in Columbia and an aging New York artist.

The Dylan Thomas Prize website describes The Boat as a “stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut”. There is no particular theme connecting the stories, with Le simply creating a series of self-contained character portraits.

The Dylan Thomas Prize

Awarded to the best published writer in English under the age of 30, The Dylan Thomas Prize was created in honour of the well known Welsh poet, writer and playwright Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953).

The Original Dylan Thomas Prize, initiated approximately 25 years ago, offered prizes for poetry and short stories in alternating years. Funding difficulties caused the award to be abandoned for some years. In 2006 the biennial Dylan Thomas Award was reinstated with the prize awarded to a Welsh writer, Rachel Trezise, for her collection of short stories titled Fresh Apples (Parthian, 2005).

The Original Dylan Thomas Prize was a monetary award of £1000. In 2008, the Award offers a prize of £60,000, making it one of the largest literary award prizes available internationally.

In addition to Le, the shortlisted writers for the 2008 Dylan Thomas Award included:

A New Writing Talent on the Rise

Karen Price at Wales Online reports that Le will be taking up a residency in the UK at the University of East Anglia, Norwich where he plans to work on his next book. No doubt both readers and critics will be looking forward to the completion of this book with great anticipation.

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