The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize is pleased to announce its 2023 judging panel

Di Speirs

Di Speirs is the Books Editor, BBC Audio. She produced the first ever Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 and has directed scores of Book at Bedtimes, dramatisations and short stories. Now the Editor of the London books team she’s responsible for BBC Readings and Audiobooks, Radio 4's Open Book and BookClub, and World Book Club and World Book Cafe on the World Service. A long-time advocate of the formidable power of the short story, she has been integral to the BBC National Short Story Award since it began in 2005, is the returning judge on the panel and is also behind the BBC Young Writers' Award. She has edited three story collections for the BBC. An Honorary member of the RSL, she is a regular literary judge and has been a nominator twice for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative (Literature). She is a board member of the Edinburgh City of Literature Trust and is on Lancaster University’s Institute for Social Futures Advisory Board.

Di Speirs is the Chair of the 2023 Judging Panel.

Twitter: @DiSpeirs

Prajwal Parajuly

Prajwal Parajuly, the son of a Nepali mother and a Nepali-Indian father, is the author of The Gurkha’s Daughter: Stories and Land Where I Flee, a novel. His works have been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Mogford Prize in the UK, the Emile Guimet Prize and the First Novel Prize in France and longlisted for the Story Prize in the US. He lives in Paris and teaches at Sciences Po.

Twitter: @prajwalparajuly

Rachel Long

Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador 2020 / Tin House 2021) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The Costa Book Award, The Rathbones Folio Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. The US edition of My Darling from the Lions was a New York Times Book Review, and named one of the 100 must-read books of 2021 by TIME. [Photo credit: Amaal Said] 

Twitter: @rachelnalong 

Jon Gower

Jon Gower is a former BBC Wales arts and media correspondent who has over 40 books to his name. These include The Story of Wales, which accompanied a landmark TV series, the travelogue An Island Called Smith and Y Storïwr which won the Wales Book of the Year. His latest book is The Turning Tide: A Biography of the Irish Sea. Jon is currently writing a Welsh language historical novel about the polar explorer Edgar Evans, a collection of essays about mountains as well as a volume about the American footballer Raymond Chester, due out in 2024. He lives in Cardiff. [Photo Credit: Marian Delyth]

Twitter: @JonGower1

Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times-bestselling author of three novels and a short story collection. Her novel Great Circle was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She lives in Los Angeles.

Twitter: @MaggieShipstead

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