Thursday, March 27 2025, 5:30 - 7:30pm Peabody Hall 115 Guest speaker This event is presented by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and by the UGA Humanities Council as part of the university's 2025 Humanities Festival. It is also part of UGA's Spring Signature Lecture Series. Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. A Sunday Times bestseller, it was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction for 2024. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son. Glorious Exploits was published in the U.S. by MacMillan in 2024, and will be released in paperback in March, 2025. Along with winning the Waterstones and Bollinger prizes, it was shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction (formerly the Costa Book Awards) and for the Newcomer of the Year by the Irish Book Awards, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence. From the publisher: On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship. Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.
