Irish novelist Keith Ridgway is awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature on June 11, 2001. Created in 1976, there is no shortlist, no entry form, and no categorisation for the award. The only requirement is for the writer to be Irish, under the age of 40, and published in Irish or English.

Ridgway is born in Dublin on October 2, 1965. An award-winning author, he has been described as “a worthy inheritor” of “the modernist tradition in Irish fiction.”

Horses, Ridgway’s first published work of fiction, appears in Faber First Fictions Volume 13 in 1997. In 1998 The Long Falling is published by Faber and Faber Limited, London. It is adapted into a film, Où va la nuit, by French director Martin Provost in 2011. A collection of short fiction, Standard Time, appears in 2000, followed by his third novel, The Parts, in 2003. Both are published by Faber and Faber. In 2006 Animals is published by 4th Estate, London. A short story, “Goo Book,” is published in the April 11, 2011, issue of The New Yorker magazine. The author’s most recent work, Hawthorn & Child, is published by New Directions Publishing on September 27, 2013. His novels have been translated into several languages and have been published in France, Italy and Germany.

In 2001, the same year that Ridgway is awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, The Long Falling receives the Prix Femina Étranger (translated as “Mauvaise Pente”). His short story “Rothko Eggs” wins the O. Henry Award in 2012 and is anthologized in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories that year.