29-year-old Claire Vaye Watkins has won this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize for her debut story collection Battleborn. “Aimed at encouraging raw creative talent worldwide” the prize is restricted to writers under 30 and is worth 30,000 pounds (about $48,000).” Ms. Watkins also won two other major prizes on the same day: the $10,000 Rosenthal Family Foundation award and the $20,000 Story Prize. Her stories are set in the American West and were inspired by her childhood in Nevada. She told Fresh Air: “I always say I exist in a constant state of homesickness, and that’s really the context in which I wrote this book, too.” Read more about this prize-winning author’s very interesting background here.
Laura