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The Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize Winner 2024
It is our enormous pleasure to reveal Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon as the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024.
From the start, our booksellers fell in love with the immense humanity and humour of Lennon’s unique, profound and ferociously funny work that transports readers to the Sicily of 412 BCE and stages an extraordinary story of friendship, art and ambition against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War.
Narrated with endless comic brilliance and a rollicking, distinctly Irish voice, Glorious Exploits follows a pair of unemployed Syracusan potters who decide to put on two of Euripides’ greatest plays in a sun-baked quarry, using captured Athenian soldiers as their cast. Wildly clever, utterly disarming and filled with moments of deepest tragedy and unexpected beauty, Lennon’s debut is a heartfelt, exhilarating tribute to the power of storytelling and the value of forgiveness.
‘‘Lennon brings the ancient world to life in technicolour, from the horrors of war to the moments of hilarity to be found in the mundane, with a charmingly eccentric cast of characters. It is a riotous, exuberant treat of a novel, which celebrates the redemptive power of art. Glorious Exploits is madly ambitious and devastatingly affecting, but above all pure page-turning joy from start to finish.’’
BEA CARVALHO, HEAD OF BOOKS, WATERSTONES
Ferociously funny and utterly disarming, Glorious Exploits transports readers to the Sicily of 412 BCE and follows a pair of unemployed Syracusan potters who decide to put on two of Euripides’ greatest plays in a sun-baked quarry, using captured Athenian soldiers as their cast. Combining a rollicking, distinctly Irish narrative voice and endless comic brilliance with moments of deepest tragedy and unexpected beauty, Lennon delivers a heartfelt, exhilarating tribute to the power of storytelling and the value of forgiveness.
‘‘A riotous, exuberant treat of a novel, which celebrates the redemptive power of art. Glorious Exploits is madly ambitious and devastatingly affecting, but above all pure page-turning joy from start to finish.’’
BEA CARVALHO, Head of Books and Campaigns
Ferdia Lennon Discusses Glorious Exploits
And the Winner Is...
Scenes from the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize cermony
An Exclusive Q&A with Ferdia Lennon on Glorious Exploits
The winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024 discusses his novel.
The 2024 Shortlist
Introducing the Shortlisted Authors
Discover our six finalists
Kaveh Akbar
Born in Iran, Kaveh Akbar moved to the United States at the age of two and is currently living in Iowa. A recipient of multiple Pushcart Prizes, he has authored two verse collections, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2018) and Pilgrim Bell (2022) which was nominated for the Forward Prize for Poetry. His work has featured in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, on BBC Radio 4 and the New Yorker's Radio Hour, among others. Martyr! is his debut novel.
Kaliane Bradley
Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines such as Electric Literature and Catapult among others and she has won the 2022 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. Inspired by a real-life doomed Victorian explorer, Bradley's debut novel The Ministry of Time blends historical and science fiction with mystery and fish-out-of-water comedy to thrilling effect.
Josie Ferguson
Josie Ferguson was born in Sweden, grew up in Scotland and studied Clinical Psychology before embarking on a career in publishing in London. She then moved to Singapore where she works as a freelance book editor. Fascinated with the Berlin Wall ever since she watched it come down on the news at the age of six, Ferguson's debut novel The Silence in Between was inspired by a real story of a Berlin family separated by the Wall.
Hanako Footman
Born in Wimbledon, South London, Hanako Footman studied at LAMDA and works as an actor. Growing up, she found very few narratives in books and films that reflected her experience as a British-Japanese person, and her debut novel Mongrel – which mines questions of identity, home, love, and belonging – sprang partly from her desire to give a voice to others who felt similarly.
Ferdia Lennon
Ferdia Lennon's fascination with the ancient Greeks started at an early age. He read History and Classics at University College Dublin, followed by a Creative Writing master’s degree at the University of East Anglia, and his short fiction has appeared in publications including the Irish Times and the Stinging Fly. Originally from Dublin, he now lives in Norwich. Glorious Exploits, an audacious and moving tragicomedy set in ancient Syracuse, is his first novel.
Rebecca K. Reilly
Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Rebecca K. Reilly obtained her BA in German and European studies from the University of Auckland and her MA from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, where she won the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing for 2019. She has a keen appreciation for the little comic moments of everyday life, which also inspired her debut novel Greta & Valdin.
2023's Winner
2022's Winner
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