THE 2008 Douglas Gageby Fellowship has been awarded to Bryan Coll for his project "Out of the night - the emerging Northern Ireland" which begins as a weekly series today, and then runs each Thursday.
Based in Paris, Bryan Coll (24) has been working as a journalist with France 24 television and has also written for Time magazine.
He was born in Bangor, Co Down, and educated in Sullivan Upper School, Holywood, and then Emmanuel College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he was chief news editor of Varsity.
The Douglas Gageby Irish Times Fellowship was established in 2005 in memory of Douglas Gageby, who edited the paper from 1963 to 1974, and 1977 to 1986. He died in June 2004.
The annual fellowship is open to print journalists at an early stage of their careers.
It was awarded in 2006 to Mary Fitzgerald for her series "Under the Crescent - the faces of Islam", and to Ruadhán Mac Cormaic in 2007 for "Changing places - migration and the reinvention of Ireland" (see Ireland.com).
This year's brief was to propose a series on the theme: "Out of the night - the emerging Northern Ireland: continuity and change, crossing political borders and borders in the mind - voices, faces, places, and currents that express the dynamics, contradictions and diversity of the province today."
The members of the judging panel were: chairwoman Ruth Barrington, a governor of the Irish Times Trust and member of the board of the The Irish Times Ltd, and chief executive of the Dublin Molecular Medicine Centre; Geraldine Kennedy, editor of The Irish Times, Patrick Gageby SC; and Patrick Smyth, Irish Times foreign editor. The fellowship administrator is Seán Hogan, former letters and obituaries editor. Details of the 2009 competition will appear in September.