The Limerick-born winner of the richest annual fiction award in the US has said he intends to use his $20,000 (€16,000) prize to buy "a little bit of writing time".
Patrick O'Keeffe, from Kilteely in east Limerick, was awarded the annual Story Prize in New York for The Hill Road, a collection of four novellas about life in a fictional Limerick village in the late 1960s.
O'Keeffe (42), a former barman and construction worker, emigrated to the US in the late 1980s and now teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"I'm struggling through a new book. The award money will give me a bit of time so I don't rush through it," he said.
The book's title story partially examines the strange preoccupations of Jack Carmody, a man on a train journey from Limerick to Dublin.
"I used to work in a pub on the North Circular Road beside Croke Park and I made the Limerick to Dublin journey many times. I never thought it would be this useful," O'Keeffe said.