The 2014 Dylan Thomas Prize, which includes a £30,000 cash prize, went to Joshua Ferris, for his novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, which Booklist describes as a “dark comedy” with “the protagonist’s sharp inner dialogues…laugh-out-loud hilarious, combining Woody Allen’s New York nihilism with an Ivy League vocabulary.”

First launched in 2006, Swansea University awards the prize annually to a young writer aged 39 or under, for the “best published or produced literary work in the English language.” Last year, Claire Vaye Watkins received the award for Battleborn.

Ferris beat out two finalists, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (winner of last year’s Booker Prize), and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (winner of this year’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction). Writer and editor of the Guardian Review, judge Nicholas Wroe wrote in The Guardian, “…the final showdown between Ferris’s angsty philosophical humour and McBride’s re-invigorated modernist take on Irish gothic made the job of myself and fellow judges, chaired by Peter Florence of the Hay festival and including musician and broadcaster Cerys Matthews and novelist and poet Tishani Doshi, a task of almost comic difficulty.”

“It is a melancholy curiosity that Ferris, a New Yorker, will now take the award back to the city where Thomas died, aged only 39 himself, in 1953,” Wroe added.

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