When the shortlists for the inaugural Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards were announced in September, it was noted that not too many Irish writers were included, but last night three of them carried off awards.
The awards are for the best book published in the last year in Ireland and the United Kingdom by a first-time author. The idea is to give encouragement and a forum to writers at what is perceived as a critical stage in their careers. Each category winner receives €5,000.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh, a native of Co Waterford who lives in Bucharest, won the fiction award for his short story collection Notes From a Turkish Whorehouse, published by Penguin Ireland. It was a particular triumph for Ó Ceallaigh who, although shortlisted in September for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in Cork, lost out to Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
The poetry award was won by Iggy McGovern for his debut collection The King of Suburbia, published by Dedalus Press, while another poetry collection, Néalta by Philip Cummings, published by Coiscéim, took the Irish language award.
The overall €20,000 Glen Dimplex New Writer of the Year Award went to Alice Hogge who had also won the biography/non-fiction award for her historical study God's Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot, published by HarperCollins.
"This masterly first book is about the dark side of Elizabethan England - religious conflict to the death - and eerily relevant today," said the judges of Hogge's book.
"The vivid reconstruction of the Jesuit mission to return England to Catholicism, and its ruthless hunting down, is compelling, original and memorable."
The fifth category, the children's book award, went to Stephen Davies for Sophie and the Albino Camel published by Andersen Press and described by writer and judge Carlo Gébler as "outstanding".
The awards, which are run in association with the Irish Writers Centre, were announced at a gala dinner in the Four Seasons Hotel in Ballsbridge, Dublin, last night.
Chairman of the Irish Writers Centre John Mellon expressed the hope that there would be even more entries for the awards in 2007.