Kit Fryatt was born in Tehran in 1978. She has lived in Ireland since 1999, and is a lecturer in English at the Mater Dei Institute of Education in Dublin, where with colleagues she co-ordinates the activities of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies. She also runs the Wurm im Apfel reading series and its associated reading group, Wurmshop.

Judge's Report by William Wall

How to think about the quality of the work and ignore the form in which it appears: that's the central problem for anybody judging the Fly prize, because the award is simply for a piece of writing - a poem, a story, an essay.

Firstly the most banal problem: stories and essays are longer than poems. It seems perverse to actually let the word-count form part of the equation, but there is some primitive link in the human mind between quantity and quality, perhaps from the time before we discovered food-miles and were focused on building up our fat reserves for the winter. I was shocked to discover this prejudice in myself. Ridiculous, I know, in one who reads and writes in both prose and poetry. Mea culpa.

The next difficulty was the way beauty and insight are dealt with in prose and poem. The intensity of the language goes a long way to explaining the difference, but it can't be applied universally, and even at best it can't account for everything.

As always there was plenty of both insight and beauty in the year's crop of Stinging Flies. In fact, there was no bad work and this makes life difficult for the judge. Bad work is almost instantly recognisable and can be dismissed out of hand. The Fly contains none of it. Every piece is interesting, most are wonderful. Several pieces provoked a profound bout of practitioner's envy.

In the end I resolved my difficulties by asking myself which of the shortlisted poems and prose I most liked. Kit Fryatt's 'Ghastlymake' came to me over and over again and it's still a persistent haunting. In a sense it imposed itself on me. The language is inventive and conscious of itself, the theme a fascinating one, the ending beautiful. It's a lyric, not a potted narrative, mysterious and beautiful as the best of them are.

A condition of the Fly Prize is that the eligible writers should not have a substantial book behind them. One of the joys of judging the competition then is in discovering a voice whose inevitable collection must be awaited with impatience. Congratulations to Kit Fryatt for a wonderful piece of work, and to the inestimably valuable Declan Meade whose contribution to Ireland will be remembered long after the bankers and property developers have been forgotten.

William Wall is the author of four novels, one of which, This Is The Country, was longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker prize, two volumes of poetry, and most recently, a collection of short fiction entitled No Paradiso (Brandon, 2006). He lives in Cork.

''Ghastlymake' was published in Issue 14 Volume Two, Winter 2009-10 which is still available for purchase.

The Stinging Fly Prize consists of €1,000 and a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmekerrig, County Monaghan. It goes each year to a writer who has published work (poetry or fiction) in the magazine and who has yet to publish a book. The residency component of the Stinging Fly Prize is sponsored by the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.