👨🎓🏛️ Warmest congratulations to UCD College of Arts & Humanities graduate Ferdia Lennon, who has been announced as the recipient of the 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Ferdia, who holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia, has won the award for his debut novel, Glorious Exploits, set in 412 BC, which tells the story of how a group of captured Athenian soldiers go about staging one of Euripides’ greatest tragedies.
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.
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 Anne Enright (1991), Professor of Creative Writing at the UCD School of English, Drama and Film.
ALT Ferdia Lennon