Ferdia Lennon prizes

Having won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize in July, Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits has been continuing to have success after success.

The debut is among seven "wickedly funny" books that have been shortlisted for the 2024 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. The prize highlights the funniest novels of the last year — those which best evoke "the Wodehouse spirit of witty characters and perfectly timed comic prose".

"There are some wickedly funny concepts here,” said the chair of judges, Peter Florence, “and some beautiful observational humour as characters fall through love and anxiety. Maybe the one thing all our writers have in common this year is that in every one of these novels there are sentences, paragraphs and chapters that make you beam with pleasure."

The winner will be announced at a reception on 2 December in London, and amongst other prizes, will have a pig named after their winning book. Glorious Exploits sounds like a fantastic name for a pig!

Glorious Exploits is also one of 46 books (23 fiction, 23 nonfiction) to have been longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. A six-title shortlist will be chosen from longlist titles and announced on 12 November 2024.

The book is also on the shortlist for the Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Please VOTE for Ferdia! The winner will be announced on 27 November. There is a lot to look forward to!