Philip Ó Ceallaigh is an Irish short story writer living in Bucharest. Ó Ceallaigh won the 2006 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, for his collection Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse. He was the first Irish writer to be shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, for his second collection of short stories, The Pleasant Light of Day. In 2010, he edited Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, an anthology of new short stories by twenty-two Irish and international writers, for The Stinging Fly Press. The New Zealand writer Charlotte Grimshaw has described him as a "clever Irish writer". Michel Faber, in The Guardian, described his control of tone, dialogue and narrative contour as "masterful". Ó Ceallaigh has spent much of his life living in Eastern Europe, including many years in Romania. He has also lived in Russia during the early nineties, America thereafter, and then his first stint in Romania beginning in 1995. He spent two years in Galway, Ireland before returning to Romania in 2000. He has also lived in Spain, Kosovo, Georgia and Egypt. Much of his work is set in Eastern Europe. He is polyglottic, speaking six languages efficiently. Ó Ceallaigh was reared in the Waterford countryside with three siblings. His father is from Dublin and his mother is from Newry. He has described his childhood as “kind of solitary [...] I'd spend a lot of time on my own, reading books. I didn't integrate very well.” He graduated from University College Dublin (UCD) with a degree in philosophy After his degree Ó Ceallaigh travelled the world, doing a variety of jobs, including waiter (from which he was fired after calling his boss a "fucker"), newspaper editor, freelance journalist and volunteer for clinical trials. He moved to Bucharest so that he could live cheaply and pursue his desire to write.