Ferdia Lennon awarded 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature

Posted on: 10 November 2025

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.

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.”

The jury praised Glorious Exploits for its ingenuity and inventive use of a Dublin vernacular voice.

Chair of the prize committee, literary agent Jonathan Williams, said: “The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 2025 has been awarded to Ferdia Lennon. The prize can be conferred on a writer for a published body of work or for an individual composition. Ferdia Lennon has been bestowed with the prize for his debut novel, Glorious Exploits, an ingenious and invigorating narrative of conflict, displacement and comradeship, set in Sicily in the fifth century B.C. during the Peloponnesian War. The story, inspired by Thucydides and Plutarch, is inventively told in a Dublin vernacular voice by one of the two central characters – out-of-work potters. The members of the Rooney Prize jury are confident that Glorious Exploits gives promise of more imaginative works of fiction from this very gifted writer.”

The Rooney Prize is the longest-established literary prize in Ireland. It is distinctive in the Irish literary landscape for its recognition of emerging writers and its ability to reward originality and risk. Previous winners include Kate Cruise O'Brien (1979), Neil Jordan (1981), Frank McGuinness (1985), Anne Enright (1991), Colum McCann (1994), Mike McCormack (1996), Claire Keegan (2000), Kevin Barry (2007), Lucy Caldwell (2011), Doireann Ní Ghríofa (2016), Seán Hewitt (2022), Michael Magee (2023), and Suad Aldara (2024).

Benefactor of the prize, Dr Peter Rooney, congratulated the winner: “Glorious Exploits is a witty and humorous re-imagining of the Greek Epic. The novel both educates and entertains the reader, exploring notions of narrative structure, history and the art of storytelling itself. It juxtaposes the horrors of warfare with the interpersonal relationship of its two primary characters, demonstrating the importance of loyalty and friendship during dark times.

“Glorious Exploits is not only a timely read for the world we find ourselves in today, but it is also a vital read…it is vital because it gives us hope, hope that there will always be light when you have love.” 

The selection committee for the Rooney Prize comprises: Jonathan Williams, literary agent (Chair); Vincent Woods, playwright, poet and broadcaster; Martina Devlin, author and newspaper columnist; Carlo Gébler, novelist, prison teacher, Assistant Professor Creative Writing, Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, Trinity; Sinéad Mac Aodha, Executive Director of Literature Ireland; and Rita Sakr, Associate Professor of English Maynooth University.

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