The winner of this year's Irish Times ESB Theatre Awards Bursary, worth £5,000, is 23-year-old Niall O'Driscoll from Rathmines, Dublin.

O'Driscoll is currently studying for an M.A. in film theory and production at the Dublin Institute of Technology. He has recently set up a new theatre company, Globex Theatre Corporation, and the bursary will be used to fund his professional directing debut, which will be a new stage adaptation (by O'Driscoll) of Franz Kafka's The Trial. It will use contemporary imagery derived from television coverage of Kosovo mixed with personal abstract imagery exploring the loss of identity of the individual in a rapidly changing environment.