Dafydd Mills Daniel Shortlisted for Society of Authors’ Award

Dr Dafydd Mills Daniel, McDonald Lecturer in Christian Ethics, has been shortlisted for the Society of Authors' ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award 2021.

Dafydd is one of only six authors shortlisted for the prize, awarded for a short story by a writer who has had at least one short story accepted for publication. 

This year, the prize was judged by Claire Fuller, Sophie Haydock, Billy Kahora, Ardashir Vakil, and Mary Watson. 

ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award judge, Ardashir Vakil, commended the shortlisted works for being ‘beautifully crafted, quirky, atmospheric and touching’, ‘tightly structured’, ‘highly original’, and ‘expertly narrated, both light and troubling’. 

Dafydd's short story, ‘What The Deal Is’, is available in The Bridport Prize Anthology 2020, having also been awarded 3rd place on the 2020 Bridport Prize. 

The Bridport Prize judge, Nell Leyshon, described Dafydd's story as follows: 

"The story I chose for third prize, What The Deal Is, is a highly musical piece with a truly original voice. Each paragraph is one sentence and the layout and punctuation are original and add to the musicality. 

It tells us how human beings are treated, how human society is ordered. It felt like a microcosm of the world... It is at once a horrible mirror on the world and a brilliant piece of writing which contains 'all kinds of cruel imaginings'." 

Here is an extract: 

...from what they said at first at least it wasn’t as bad as you might have thought in that there’s worse places for that kind of thing and the people there look worse sometimes but when you thought about it and stood in it longer it could seem just as bad 

because although there never came a time for asking about certain things 

because other things is more important once the law gets moving 

the things you thought about later strike you just as bad and make the whole thing worse than it could ever have looked at first and breed all kinds of cruel imaginings 

...so you have to say that some things are just far worse than you ever can tell and there’s no glimmering relief in a first look to be held on to that might tell you it could be worse

that all you have to know is that ever thing is pushing itself into this great big lump of hatred and you can’t look at it the same when you find it in its pieces but it all belongs in the same shape.