Introducing our 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature Winner, Ferdia Lennon for his novel, Glorious Exploits.
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.
About The Rooney Prize
The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature is for an outstanding body of work by an emerging Irish writer under forty years of age. The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature is valued at €10,000. The prize has been awarded annually since 1976, through the generosity of the late Dr Daniel Rooney, and of his wife Patricia. (Dr Rooney served as Ambassador of the United States of America to Ireland.) The Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre is deeply honoured that Dr Peter Rooney, their nephew, is the new benefactor of the Rooney Prize, continuing the Rooney family’s long association with Irish Literature and support for ‘the longest-established literary prize’. Since 1976 the prize has achieved renown as one of the most distinguished of Irish literary awards.
Making a Difference in the Lives of Others
The Fellowship will enable a creative writer to join the research community in the Hub and to engage with the institute’s many research projects and initiatives. The inaugural Fellow is Caitríona Lally, who began her position in January 2022.
Rooney Writer Fellowship
