For the second year running, Druid Theatre Company and Irish playwright Enda Walsh have won the Scotsman Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival.

Druid's production of The New Electric Ballroom, which received its Irish premiere during the Galway Arts Festival last month, has been showered with glowing reviews from critics in Edinburgh. The Druid production of Walsh's The Walworth Farcewon a ScotsmanFringe First Award at the festival last year and subsequently travelled to much acclaim in New York. Walsh, who also directed the play, said the award was "a recognition of Druid's care and delivery of the production", which was "very fortunate to secure four extraordinary actors". The New Electric Ballroomstars Val Lilley, Rosaleen Linehan, Mikel Murfi and Catherine Walsh. Walsh said he hopes their performances will be seen in many more places.

Like most of the Irish acts in Edinburgh, Druid's trip is supported by Culture Ireland. Eugene Downes greeted news of the award, which will be officially announced today, with praise for Walsh. "In the global spotlight of Edinburgh, Enda is being recognised as one of the great playwrights of his generation."

Dublin-born Walsh, now well-established as perhaps the finest playwright of his generation, is no stranger to awards in Edinburgh: he also won a Fringe First for Bedboundin 2001 and the Critic's Choice Award for Disco Pigs in 1997. The Scotsman drama critic Joyce McMillan, reviewing The New Electric Ballroom, called him the "most explosively brilliant of modern Irish stage poets" and Benedict Nightingale of the Timessaid he "writes with an invention and verve all his own", while Lyn Gardner in the Guardiansaid the play "confirms [Walsh] as one of the most dazzling wordsmiths of contemporary theatre".