The Boat wins $100,000 Dylan Thomas Book Prize

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 11/11/2008 7:55:00 AM

Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le is the second winner of the biannual Dylan Thomas Book Prize, which awards £60,000 ($100,000) to a writer under 30 and working in English. The prize was established by the University of Wales in 2004 and awarded for the second time in the Welsh city of Swansea last night.

Le, 29, won for his short story collection The Boat, published earlier this year by Knopf. A number of the book’s seven stories touch on Le’s complicated personal history. A Vietnamese refugee who was taken to Australia when he was three months old, Le was raised in Melbourne, educated at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and now serves as fiction editor of the Harvard Review and is a writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. As part of the prize, he will also spend a week in residence at the University of Texas in Austin.

"Nam tackles his own background and circumstances as well as that of others with a clear eye, focused intelligence and wonderful use of words,” said Peter Florence--co-founder of the Hay literary festival--and chairman of the prize judges.

Le won the prize over five other shortlisted writers, including Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu, author of “The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears” (Riverhead) and New York-based writer Cerdiwen Dovey, author of “Blood Kin” (Viking).

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