MORE CHEDDAR From Wales comes a new literary prize that will be one of the world’s biggest. The Dylan Thomas Prize, named after the Welsh poet, will be awarded for the best book written in English by any author under 30. The winner of the L60,000 ($110,625) award will be announced on Thomas’s birthday, October 27, and it will be awarded for the first time in the spring of 2005.

Writer and broadcaster Peter Stead, who is from Thomas’s hometown of Swansea, won the backing of the Welsh Arts Council and the Wales Tourist Board. He has also managed to find 50% of the financial support in the private corporate sector.

The announcement of the prize follows the creation just two months ago of the Man Booker International Prize to complement the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction, commonly known as the Booker Prize. Whereas the Booker awards L50,000 each year to an author for a single work of fiction in English, the Booker International is worth L60,000 every other year. It can be won by a writer from any country writing in any language.

With an extra $220,000 in award money up for grabs every second year, perhaps fiction writers around the world will be newly inspired.

***

NOTES The Katonah Museum of Art, located northeast of Manhattan in Katonah, N.Y., is this year’s winner of a Downstate Organization Award for Advancing Cultural Development in New York State from the Alliance of New York State Arts Organizations. … Brooklyn-based photographer Katy Grannan is the recipient of this year’s Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers and a $10,000 cash grant from the Baum Foundation. The Baum Award is given to a promising American photographer who has not yet had a comprehensive one-person museum exhibition. Ms. Grannan participated in the Whitney Biennial earlier this year.

artsdesk@nysun.com