Long list revealed for £30,000 Dylan Thomas literary prize

Thomas Morris and Andrew McMillan

The long list for the £30,000 Dylan Thomas literary prize for young writers has been unveiled.

Nominations include short stories set in Caerphilly by locally-born writer Thomas Morris, now based in Dublin.

Yorkshire-born poet Andrew McMillan has already won the £10,000 Guardian first book award for Physical.

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma and Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways were on the 2015 Man Booker shortlist.

The winner, to be announced in May, will go to the best published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under.

Morris in his teens had a trial with Cardiff City and played Welsh League football. He is editor of The Stinging Fly magazine in Dublin, where he studied English and philosophy.

McMillan, the son of poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan, published his debut collection last year and is a lecturer in creative writing in Liverpool and co-founder of the literary magazine Cake.

A shortlist of six will be chosen in March.

Chairman of the judging panel Prof Dai Smith said: "At this stage the only certainty now is that the judges will end up with an exceptionally strong shortlist of six stunningly gifted authors."

• Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

• Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

• Tania James, The Tusk that did the Damage

• Frances Leviston, Disinformation

• Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

• Andrew McMillan, Physical

• Thomas Morris, We Don't Know What We're Doing

• Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

• Julia Pierpont, Among the Ten Thousand Things

• Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers

• Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways

• Laura van den Berg, Find Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

It is the 10th year of the prize, which took a break last year so the annual awards could be rearranged to coincide with International Dylan Thomas Day on 14 May.