Comic and poet Tim Key won Britain's top comedy award today on the final day of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world's largest annual event of its kind dedicated to the arts.
Key (32), from Cambridge, first appeared on the Fringe in 2001, and edged out five other nominees for the 2009 award which carries a cash prize of 8,000 pounds and invitations to appear in the Montreal, Toronto and Chicago Just For Laughs comedy festivals.
Comedy Awards producer and London impresario Nica Burns said: "Tim Key is a one-off; an adorable diffident performance poet and stand-up. His charming show is full of surprises. Tim has funny bones and is a star in the making."
Keys said he had started writing poetry three years ago. "Then I did a gig with them in it and it went okay, so I've just done poems since then.
"Some of them are wilfully funny and some of them are wilfully weird, and some of them are completely unusable and are just stowed away."
After a Fringe show in 2007, he published a book of his poetry, 25 Poems, 3 Recipes and 32 Other Suggestions.
English comic Jonny Sweet (24), won the best newcomer award for the Fringe with a rollicking ride in his character comedy Mostly About Arthur.
Sweet is soon to be seen in a television docu-drama playing the young David Cameron - now leader of the Conservative party.
A separate jury panel award of 4,000 pounds went to London-based Peter Buckley Hill for his work since 1996 "in encouraging and enabling some of the most exciting young talent on the comedy circuit to perform at the most important arts festival in the world".
Buckley had 176 shows on his books this year. Performers provide free shows in free venues such as bars, pubs and restaurants to expose and promote new talent.
The Fringe was born in 1947 as an anarchistic alternative to the more up-market Edinburgh International Festival, founded the same year as a beacon of artistic hope in the days following World War Two.
The Comedy Awards were created in 1981 and have given a major boost to comedians and actors through the years. The first prize 28 years ago went to the Cambridge Footlights team, which included such luminaries as Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie and Tony Slattery.
Co-founded by Burns, commercial sponsorship ran out this year, and she poured 150,000 pounds of her own money into promoting and running the 2009 awards, while hopeful of more sponsorship in the future.
Reuters