YOUNG playwright Cahir O'Doherty from Derry (who wrote I and directed The Wit of a Sparrow for last year's Fringe Dublin Theatre Festival) has been awarded a Kenneth Branagh Renaissance Award of Pounds 3,000, which will go towards his fees at Yale, where he will take part in the Playwriting Programme, starting this Autumn. He was selected for one of three places at Yale from more than 250 students and is the first Irish writer to obtain one.

Another young Irish playwright who is doing well is Conor McPherson, whose play This Lime Tree Bower (which premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival last year and has since won him a Thames TV new playwright award and a Guinness/National Theatre Ingenuity award) opens at the Bush Theatre tomorrow night, and is published, along with two of his other plays, by New Island/Nick Hern Books, this month.