The Cuírt prize was judged by celebrated Nigerian writer, Helon Habila, who had this to say about the winning entry:

I choose Gerry McCullough’s ‘Primroses’ as winner because it is a simple and well judged story about very difficult themes: courage, paedophilia, and growing old. The author has managed to truly inhabit [her] narrator, to use his voice, and to clearly see his point of view – these make the story so convincing that the reader is not aware how difficult it is to achieve.

Age and the passage of time are shown in the change in the landscape, in the ugly square houses that have sprouted to replace the beautiful flower gardens of the narrator’s youth. The relationship between the narrator and the little girl, Jacqueline, is used to recapture the relationship between the narrator and his dead wife: youth and age, present and past are thus simultaneously captured in a single frame.

The narrator refuses to back down from his purely innocent relationship with Jacqueline even at the risk of being seen as a paedophile, this takes courage. Finally the story is about flowers – primroses – those beautiful, non-utilitarian things that symbolise the brittleness of existence, the fine balance on which everything rests, transience, and trust.