Orlaith O'Sullivan is originally from Dublin and now lives in Baltimore, County Cork. She has been writing full-time since 2006 and is in the process of finishing a novel, while also writing more short stories and a screen adaptation of The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox. Her website and blog are at www.orlaithosullivan.com.

Judge's Report by Sinéad Morrissey

It is, of course, very difficult to judge poetry and prose by the same measure. Poems are more vulnerable on the (more often than not) single page; prose has its several associated pages to keep it company. On the other hand, prose can trip itself up pretty quickly: the reader usually knows from the first paragraph if this world is going to be worth entering, or not, if the voice is true, or the unravelling of the scenario worth holding out for. A poem can only be four lines long and contain less than twenty words and still be blindingly successful if those words are the right ones. In the course of reading the eligible entries in both prose and poetry, I changed my mind several times about which genre held the advantage.

In the end, I had to place the question of genre to one side, as much as it was possible to do so, and establish, or re-establish, basic, fundamental characteristics of excellent writing. Surprise became the defining factor. I wanted to find work which took me by surprise, which deepened upon subsequent readings, and which was deft enough in the deployment of its own rules that they had been internalised, rendered invisible by the creative momentum they allowed.

While there was evidence of strong work in abundance throughout all three issues, in both genres, nothing surprised me as much as Orlaith O'Sullivan's 'A Tall Tale', a suicide-story in the voice of a small boy born with primordial dwarfism (MOPD Type II). I was drawn, without even being aware of it, into the boy's mind from the opening sentence, and stayed with him to the end, forgetting where I was, the reason I was reading the story, the time of day etc. I experienced that intoxicating dissolution of boundaries between reader and author that all writers dream of and that very few achieve. Which can only come about when the machine is so carefully put together, its running is flawless and we don't even notice the mechanism.

There was no sense of wasted space in this writing. The voice drove it, and through that voice came everything else we needed to know: his loneliness; his mother's stultifying love; the bullying; the history of painful medical intervention. These are the tragic structural pins of the story, rather like the four pins that hold the 'halo' in place which 'kept my head and spine statue-still, while the glue in my bones hardened'. The surprise comes when out of this awful context emerges a voice that is resilient, life-hungry, clever, funny, and vastly resourceful. "They say the richer the country, the taller the people. I don't believe that, because Leonid Stadnyk is from the Ukraine. He can't even afford to buy shoes for his enormous feet. For years, he wouldn't let the Guinness Book of Records measure him. He just wanted to forget about his size. But they wouldn't leave him alone." How could you not want to spend more time in this person's company?

The decision was clear. Congratulations.

Sinéad Morrissey has published three collections with Carcanet Press: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002) and The State of the Prisons (2005). A lecturer in creative writing at Queen's University, Belfast, she has just completed her fourth collection.

'A Tall Tale', was published in our Summer 2008 edition (Issue 10 Volume Two) which is still available for purchase.

The Stinging Fly Prize consists of €1,000 and a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmekerrig, County Monaghan. It goes each year to a writer who has published work (poetry or fiction) in the magazine and who has yet to publish a book.