Congratulations to ferdialennon who has won the 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Awarded annually since 1976, the prize celebrates an outstanding body of work by an emerging Irish writer and is administered by the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for Creative Writing. Ferdia was born and raised in Dublin. His first novel, Glorious Exploits, 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 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...