AMERICAN POET SASHA DEBEVEC-MCKENNEY WINS WORLD’S LARGEST PRIZE FOR YOUNG WRITERS WITH JOY IS MY MIDDLE NAME

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has been announced as the winner of the world’s largest and most prestigious literary prize for young writers – the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize – for her debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name.

The other titles shortlisted for the 2026 Prize were: To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong (Les Fugitives); We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Chatto & Windus, Vintage); Under the Blue by Suzannah V. Evans (Bloomsbury Poetry); Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape, Vintage); and Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu (Canongate).

Chosen in a unanimous decision by this year’s judging panel, Joy Is My Middle Name documents the journey of crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties, navigating sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism and pop culture. The judging panel praised Sasha for her energising, exuberant and robust collection, condensing huge ideas into something that is truly a joy to read.

The 2026 Prize was judged by Irenosen Okojie, the award-winning Nigerian British author of Curandera, Butterfly Fish, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch, along with: Joe Dunthorne, poet and novelist, whose debut Submarine, was translated into fifteen languages and made into an award-winning film; Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, poet, pacifist and fabulist; Prajwal Parajuly, author of The Gurkha’s Daughter: Stories and Land Where I Flee, a novel, whose work has been nominated for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize; and Eley Williams, acclaimed author of Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, whose work has been nominated for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy Is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney joins an astonishing list of writers to have been awarded this prestigious prize, including Yasmin Zaher, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Arinze Ifeakandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Maggie Shipstead, Guy Gunaratne, and Kayo Chingonyi.

The Dylan Thomas Prize

Launched in 2006, the annual Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize is one of the most prestigious awards for young writers, aimed at encouraging raw creative talent worldwide. It celebrates and nurtures international literary excellence. Worth £20,000, it is one of the UK’s most prestigious literary prizes as well as one of the world’s largest literary prizes for young writers. Awarded for the best published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under, the Prize celebrates the international world of fiction in all its forms including poetry, novels, short stories and drama. The prize is named after the Swansea-born writer, Dylan Thomas, and celebrates his 39 years of creativity and productivity. One of the most influential, internationally renowned writers of the mid-twentieth century, the prize invokes his memory to support the writers of today and nurture the talents of tomorrow.