Elyse Fenton flew to Wales late last year to accept the 2010 Dylan Thomas Prize, a ₤30,000 ($47,000) award for English language literature given by the University of Wales to a writer under 30.
Fenton won for Clamor, a book of poems she worked on as an MFA student in the UO Creative Writing Program—at the same time that her husband was serving with the U.S. military as a doctor in Iraq.
Her collection explores themes of love and war, inspired by fragments of instant messaging conversations Fenton shared with her deployed husband. Her work has been praised for elegantly weaving the brutality of warfare with the quiet solitude of longing, loss and uncertainty. Peter Florence, chair of the Dylan Thomas Prize judges, described Fenton’s book as “an astonishing, fully accomplished book of huge ambition and spectacular delivery.”
Clamor is the first book of poetry to have won the prize since the award was established in 2004. Fenton has published other pieces on the same theme including “My Deployment as a War Bride,” an essay in the New York Times in 2008.
Welsh author Dylan Thomas is best known for his poetry, about half of which he published before he was 20. He died in 1953 at the age of 39.
—Patricia Hickson
Photo by Be The Change Inc. Elyse Fenton was part of the original cast of Telling, a theater project through which actors—many of them affiliated with the UO—tell their first-person stories related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, Fenton performs on Veterans Day 2010 in Washington, D.C.
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