Irish writer Julian Gough yesterday won this year's National Short Story Prize in Britain.
He receives £15,000 (€22,000) - the largest award in the world for a single short story - for The Orphan and the Mob.
The judges were Monica Ali, A.S. Byatt, Di Speirs, Alex Linklater and chairman Mark Lawson, who said of the unanimous winner that "the comedy, energy and originality of both plot and voice set him ahead of the other contenders".
The other shortlisted authors were David Almond (runner-up), Jonathan Falla, Jackie Kay and Hanif Kureishi.
Gough was born in London, but grew up in Galway, and he was lead singer with the 1980s cult rock band Toasted Heretic. His first novel, Juno and Juliet, was published in 2001.
He moved to Berlin recently, but was in London yesterday at the Bafta headquarters, from where the winner was announced on BBC Radio 4's Todayprogramme. He said that he had cried when he heard his name read out as the winner: "I was convinced no one would vote for the story of an orphan pissing on a Fianna Fáil minister."
Then the devilment comes out. "But that they did reflects great shame on the state of English literature. You call that art?"
The story is about "an orphan's quest for true love and the secret of his origins - it's a belt-and-braces story that Dickens would recognise, complicated by the fact that he has two penises".
The prize will be a big boost to Gough's literary career and, he said, he could now pay the back rent he owed to his former landlord in Galway. He was evicted on New Year's Day, 2006.
Gough's winning story is available online at prospect-magazine.co.uk.
It forms the prologue to his second novel, Jude: Level 1, which is to be published in July in paperback. Level 2 and Level 3 will be published free on the internet ("in instalments, like a postmodern Dickens"), and all three sections are to be published in hardback next year.
Gough said that the award repaid the faith which his publisher Old Street and his agent Charlie Campbell had in him, as the novel had been turned down by a number of publishers as too strange for them to be able to sell.
