The Irish author Paul Murray has won the inaugural £30,000 Nero Gold prize for The Bee Sting, a comic family saga set in rural Ireland.
Murray was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Thursday. “This is a wonderfully ambitious and entrancing novel about a family imploding against a background of Ireland’s economic and social crisis of the late 00s,” said the judging chair and Booker-winning author Bernardine Evaristo.