Ferdia Lennon has been awarded the 2024 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, which means a pig will be named after his winning novel, Glorious Exploits.
The prize, set up in 2000, seeks to recognise the funniest new novels that best evoke the spirit of PG Wodehouse’s work. As well as the chance to name a gloucestershire old spots pig, the winner receives a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and a complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection.
Lennon said he was both “stunned and utterly delighted” to have won. The Norwich-based author joked that “For Samuel Beckett, the act of writing was the placing of stains on silence and nothingness. For me, it has always been more of a means to secure pig-naming rights.”
Set in Syracuse in 412BC, in the aftermath of Athens’ failed invasion of Sicily, Glorious Exploits is about two potters who decide to put on a production of Medea in a quarry where Athenian soldiers are held captive, using the prisoners as actors.
Chair of judges, Hay festival co-founder Peter Florence, described Lennon’s novel as “a delightful mash of contemporary Irish comedy and classical Athenian tragedy”.
He said he and his fellow judges, David Campbell, publisher at Everyman’s Library, comedians Pippa Evans and Sindhu Vee, broadcaster and author James Naughtie and Justin Albert, vice-chair of the University of Wales, were “all laughing and cheering Lennon’s comic spirit”.
Lennon was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and Libyan father and holds a BA in history and classics from University College Dublin and an MA in prose fiction from the University of East Anglia. “My fascination for ancient Greece began as a child,” he told the Guardian when Glorious Exploits won the Waterstones debut fiction prize in July. “However, not being personally acquainted with any gods or mythical heroes, I decided to tell my novel from the perspective of two ordinary lads with a love of story.”
Up against Lennon’s novel on the Bollinger prize shortlist were A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray, Good Material by Dolly Alderton, High Vaultage by Chris Sugden and Jen Sugden, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue and You Are Here by David Nicholls.
Previous winners have included Percival Everett, Helen Fielding and Terry Pratchett. Last year, Bob Mortimer won for his novel The Satsuma Complex.
• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Penguin Books Ltd, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
