Joshua Ferris wins Dylan Thomas prize

The 2014 Dylan Thomas prize was billed as a Champions League final between already multiple award-winning Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. But in the end, after a long judging session, the £30,000 cheque, awarded in Thomas’s centenary year, went to Joshua Ferris for his deeply funny and deeply serious novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, in which dentistry, baseball and existential dread combine with contemporary New York, unlikely Old Testament peoples and the modern malaise of being emotionally disconnected in a hyper-connected age.

As a prize that traditionally has to decide between all types of fiction - this years the shortlist featured poetry, drama, short stories and novels from writers Owen Sheers, Kei Miller, Naomi Wood and Kseniya Melnik, as well Ferris, McBride and Catton – 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.

But Ferris eventually came out on top and becomes the seventh winner of the prize that this year entered new phase under the sponsorship of Swansea University and has for the first time raised the age limit for 30 to 39. 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.