Ferdia Lennon has been announced as the recipient of the 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
He will be presented with the award at a ceremony in Trinity College Dublin this evening Monday, November 10th.
The €10,000 Rooney Prize, awarded annually since 1976, celebrates an outstanding body of work by an emerging Irish writer under 40 years of age.
It is administered by the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for Creative Writing in the School of English, Trinity.
Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. Glorious Exploits, his first novel, was published by Penguin Fig Tree in January 2024.
Set in Sicily in 412 BC during the Peloponnesian War, the novel focuses on two local potters and a group of captured Athenian soldiers staging one of Euripides' greatest tragedies.
The darkly comic novel was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024 and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Comic Fiction Prize 2024.
The jury praised Glorious Exploits for its ingenuity and inventive use of a Dublin vernacular voice.
Responding to the news of the award, Ferdia Lennon said: "So many of the previous winners of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature are writers whose work has inspired and moved me throughout my own writing life. To be recognised by the same award is both a wonderful and deeply affirming experience.
"I'm profoundly grateful to Peter Rooney and the Rooney family for their generosity, and to the judges for the care and attention they brought to reading my work. We Irish writers are fortunate to have, in our literature, such a rich imaginative ground to return to; and to be acknowledged among the ranks of such a remarkable body of work here at home is a joy and an honour I’ll carry with me."
