Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (published in the U.S. by Holt) has won the £5,000 (about $6,430) 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. The company wrote, "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."
Bea Carvalho, head of books, Waterstones, added: "‘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."
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The longlist has been chosen for the $5,000 2024 New American Voices Award, which recognizes "the work of first-generation writers" and is sponsored by Fall for the Book and George Mason University's Institute for Immigration Research. Three finalists will be announced later this summer and the winner in October.
The longlist:
The Material by Camille Bordas (Random House)
Green Frog by Gina Chung (Vintage)
The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza (Simon & Schuster)
A Great Country by Shilpi Somaya Gowda (Mariner Books)
Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult)
Inside the Mirror by Parul Kapur (University of Nebraska Press)
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko (Riverhead)
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima (Tor)
The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma (Hogarth)
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr. (Mariner Books)
Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez (Riverhead)
Private Equity by Carrie Sun (Penguin Press)