UCD alum Ferdia Lennon wins 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature
11 November 2025
Irish writer Ferdia Lennon has been announced as the recipient of the 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
A UCD College of Arts & Humanities graduate, Ferdia, who holds a BA in History and Classics from the University, won the award, which includes €10,000 prize money, for his debut novel, Glorious Exploits.
Set in Sicily in 412BC 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 won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024 and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Comic Fiction Prize 2024, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and was adapted for BBC Radio 4.
The longest-established literary prize in Ireland, the Rooney Prize, awarded annually since 1976, celebrates an outstanding body of work by an emerging Irish writer under 40 years of age.
Responding to award, Ferdia 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.”
Members of the selection committee - Jonathan Williams, literary agent (Chair); Rita Sakr, Associate Professor of English Maynooth University; Sinéad Mac Aodha, Executive Director of Literature Ireland; Vincent Woods, playwright, poet and broadcaster; Martina Devlin, author and newspaper columnist; with Ferdia Lennon (centre), Dr Linda Doyle, Provost of Trinity College Dublin; and Dr Peter Rooney, the benefactor of the Rooney Prize
Other recipients of the Rooney Prize include fellow UCD graduates Neil Jordan (1981), Ronan Sheehan (1984), Frank McGuinness (1985), Paul Mercier (1986), Gerard Fanning (1993), Philip Ó Ceallaigh (2006), Kevin Power (2009), Colin Barrett (2016), and Niamh Campbell (2021).
It also includes (opens in a new window)Anne Enright (1991), Professor of Creative Writing at the UCD School of English, Drama and Film.
The Rooney Prize is administered by the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for Creative Writing in the School of English, Trinity.
The prize has been awarded annually through the generosity of the late Dr Daniel Rooney, former Ambassador of the United States of America to Ireland, and of his wife Patricia.
By: David Kearns, Digital Journalist / Media Officer, UCD University Relations
To contact the UCD News & Content Team, email: newsdesk@ucd.ie
