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The second winner of the largest literary prize for a writer under the age of 30 was announced this month -- Nam Le, author of the The Boat, claimed the Dylan Thomas Prize from the shortlisted group of outstanding young writers.
"Nam tackles his own background and circumstances as well as that of others with a clear eye, focused intelligence and wonderful use of words," Peter Florence, the chairman of the judges, said. "He is, in this panel's opinion, a phenomenal literary talent, and I look forward to following his career as it progresses."
Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the University of East Anglia. His fiction has appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, NPR's Selected Shorts, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.