Ronan Doyle was born in County Galway in 1977. He has a BA in English and an MA in Journalism. Having lived in Japan for two years, he now teaches English in Dublin and writes fiction. His first story was published in The Sunday Tribune early in 2006.

Judge's Report by Colum McCann

"Show business is a cruel and nasty money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs," said the redoubtable Hunter S. Thompson, who then added: "Of course there's also a negative side."

Many a young, or as-yet unpublished writer, might recognise the sentiments. The struggle to create is trumped by the necessity to publish, which doesn't necessarily mean that the work will ever really get noticed, or at least widely read.

One of the things that I admire about The Stinging Fly is that it is one of the few Irish outlets where writers have a chance to add to the literary pulse. It encourages new writers, so it dares to be there when the bread comes out of the oven. This is hardly the easiest job and sometimes it is one of the most thankless. One can imagine the editors waiting for the post with a mixture of dread and a jacked-up anticipation that today might be the day when that vaunted poem or story lands on the desk. For the writer then, there's the different terror of waiting.

There are possibly very few moments that will ever match the one when the writer gets news of his/her first publication. Even better is the notion that one might make some money from it and-glory of glories-a chance to take off for a month or two, simply to find silence and write. And so the Stinging Fly Prize-with publication, a ¤1,000 payment and a stint at Annaghmakerrig-is possibly one of the best things that can happen at the start of a literary career. It certainly beats single-bar heaters and rejection notes.

The stories and poems for this year's award were almost all at a standard where they deserved to be taken seriously. While there was a little sameness to the fiction, and a certain tentativeness to a few of the poems, each piece of work dared in its own way.

As a fiction writer, but an avid reader of poetry, I was open to both categories and in fact, many more poems made it to my short-list than did stories.

Yet in the end it was Ronan Doyle's "The Complicated Architect" that seemed to merit a chance for the writer to take a swim at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. This story had a nicely-crafted Paul Auster-esque narrative thrust. The sentences were finely chiselled. The story consciously denied essential information and made it all the more appealing for its sense of mystery. "Of course it had long ago become difficult to separate the truth from the lies, as the only person who could verify anything was myself," says the narrator, who also at one stage says that there were "no rats or luminosities" in his dreams anymore.

A fine piece of work and an interesting twist in psychological fiction-calm, controlled, but with a madness at its core, as if Colm Tóibín had met Patrick McCabe and they'd conspired to create a story together in, of all places, Japan.

There were other splendid pieces of work in the competition, but I have grown wary of naming names-suffice it to say that there were thirty writers and each of them could have won the award, and that's no bullshit. I recall these times myself, when I waited for the first acceptance letter to drop on the mat, or the grant, or the award. For me, it took a whole room full of rejection slips-they eventually became my wallpaper-before I got my first publication, and after that, I got my application to Annaghmakerrig accepted and finished my first novel, Songdogs, there. I always feel grateful to all who were involved. I didn't always recognise it properly, but it was these moments that opened up a life for me.

There was no Stinging Fly magazine then (the early 1980s). There is, thankfully, now.

-New York, November 2006