Ó Ceallaigh won the 2006 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was shortlisted twice (2006 and 2009) for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
[1] After receiving his degree, Ó Ceallaigh travelled the world, doing a variety of jobs, including waiter, newspaper editor, freelance journalist and volunteer for clinical trials.
His work has appeared in Granta, the Irish Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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.
He has acknowledged being influenced in his writing style by Charles Bukowski, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and Ivan Turgenev.
[1][6] He was the first Irish writer to be shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (for Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse in 2006).