Irish newcomer Patrick O'Keeffe has won the Story Prize for short stories for his book The Hill Road.
Irish-born O'Keeffe won the $20,000 first prize, the largest cash prize of any annual US fiction award, and an engraved silver bowl for his collection of four novellas set in a fictional Irish dairy-farming village and published by Penguin's Viking imprint.
"I didn't think this would happen," O'Keeffe (42) said, visibly shocked on accepting the award at The New School in Manhattan. "Thanks a lot."
O'Keeffe said in an interview after the ceremony he first came to the United States in 1986 as an illegal immigrant without a college education, working in bars, waiting tables and working on construction sites.
In 1989, he returned to the United States after winning a green card in a lottery, passed his high school equivalency exam and enrolled in university in 1990 to study English, finally graduating at the age of 32.
He then earned a graduate fine arts degree in writing from the University of Michigan, where he is now a lecturer. "This is always what I wanted to do. I had nothing to lose," he said of his desire to be an author, which began with his first efforts at writing in his late 20s.