Irish novelist Ferdia Lennon discusses the runaway success of his first novel, Glorious Exploits, which won the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, and has been adapted for BBC Radio 4.
Ancient Sicily. Enter Gelon: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter Lampo: lovesick, jobless, in need of a distraction. Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads. They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food. And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry. It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of. What could possibly go wrong?
