Joy conquers all: Sasha Debevec-McKenney wins the 2026 Dylan Thomas Prize

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney won the 2026 Dylan Thomas Prize for Joy Is My Middle Name. (Photo: swansea.ac.uk/press-office/)American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney won the 2026 Dylan Thomas Prize on Thursday evening, taking home the £20,000 (approx. ₹25,88,800) award for her debut poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name, published by London-based independent press Fitzcarraldo Editions. The Dylan Thomas Prize is one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards for writers aged 39 or under. Named after the celebrated Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who wrote the famous poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night” (1951), the Swansea University in Wales, UK hosts the award every year. Now in its 20th year, the prize recognises the best published work in English across poetry, novels, short stories and drama, making it one of the few major literary awards to honour poetry and fiction on equal footing.The announcement ceremony, which took place inside Swansea University’s Great Hall, was live streamed. “I really love writing poems,” Debevec-McKenney told the audience. “It’s like the thing that makes life worth living for me. It is like every experience, every feeling, there’s a poem for that.” The collection, which charts the passage from one’s turbulent 20s into steadier 30s, was praised by jury chair and award-winning Nigerian British author Irenesèn Okoje as “audacious and powerful,” a work that dissects race, womanhood, culture and addiction through a series of propulsive, intimate dispatches. “Hilarious and teeming with multitudes,” the jury summary read, “a book that fully embodies its title.” Debevec-McKenney, currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, has published poems in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review. Speaking in a pre-ceremony video, Debevec-McKenney spoke about what the shortlisting alone had meant to her, “It means that I should keep writing poems — and more than that, that I should keep writing weird, funny poems like I like to write. And that just feels amazing.” With the prize now won, one imagines the poems will keep coming. The shortlist The books shortlisted for the Dylan Prize shortlist. (Generated using AI)The shortlist featured four novels and two debut poetry collections. Here are the five other finalists:Story continues below this ad 📌 To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong (Les Fugitives): A debut novel following an unnamed psychology undergraduate through a consuming, unrequited obsession with a postgraduate student. Set against the backdrop of Gen Z campus life, it maps the slow disintegration of a young woman’s sense of self in this devastating anti-Bildungsroman. 📌 We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Chatto & Windus): Written in South Yorkshire dialect, this debut traces the friendship of three Doncaster women from adolescence into adulthood, as a long-buried secret threatens to unravel the bonds that have held them together. 📌 Under the Blue by Suzannah V Evans (Bloomsbury Poetry): A kaleidoscopic sequence of fragmental prose poems and prose postcards exploring the emotional weight of caring for an ailing parent. Candid, luminous and deeply humane, it gives voice to experiences that often go unspoken. 📌Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape): A debut novel set across the seasons of a single year in rural Ireland, charting the tentative first love between two men.Story continues below this ad 📌Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu (Canongate) Told across two parallel timelines, this novel follows a young Black man navigating love, drugs and mental health in contemporary London. Aishwarya Khosla is a senior editorial figure at The Indian Express, where she spearheads the digital strategy and execution for the Books & Literature and Puzzles & Games sections. With over eight years of experience in high-stakes journalism, Aishwarya specializes in literary criticism, cultural comm