Ferdia Lennon: ‘I was tired of Merchant Ivory accents’

The recent winner of the Waterstones debut fiction prize on literary friendships, the lucidity of Georges Simenon and Irish writing’s debt to the financial crash

Ferdia Lennon, 36, was born and raised in Dublin. His first novel, Glorious Exploits, set in ancient Sicily, was the winner of this year’s Waterstones debut fiction prize. It follows two jobless potters who decide to co-direct a play performed by Athenian prisoners of war. The New York Times called it “a comic riff on Greek tragedy, with an Irish accent”; for Roddy Doyle, it’s a tale of “modern-day Dubliners living among ancient Greeks”. Lennon spoke from his home in Norwich.

Tell us where this novel began.
I’ve been fascinated by ancient Greece since I was a kid. Then I read History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, a chronicle of the 27-year war between Athens and Sparta, which spilled out across the Mediterranean world. Athens launched this unprovoked invasion of Sicily, primarily against Syracuse, the main power. They thought: “We’ll be done in a few months and it’ll help us win in Greece.” It ends up with thousands of Athenian prisoners being flung into a quarry outside the city of Syracuse. I knew I wanted to write about that, but didn’t yet know my angle. Then a couple of years later, I was reading Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, where he describes how some of those defeated Athenians survived by quoting lines from Euripides, the most popular dramatist amongst the Sicilians. I thought, OK, that’s my story: who were these Syracusans who left Athenian prisoners to die in this open-air pit, yet were so fascinated by their drama that they’re willing to save them in exchange for these precious lines?

What led you to centre the action on two unemployed friends?
Some of my favourite books and films are about friendship: Don Quixote, Withnail & I… Starving Athenians in a quarry in 412BCE is completely beyond the pale of what people are familiar with, but you can ground it in a friendship that people will understand. Most people have experienced that sense of their life not necessarily going quite the way that they’d hoped, some unrealised or unfulfilled ambitions.

Why did you write it in a Dublin voice?
Why not? I’m not going to write in an ancient Greek or fifth-century BC Syracusan dialect. There’s always a decision about which version of English to use. At first I was thinking: this is coming out quite Irish, do I pull back or double down? For me, it made sense to double down. I was tired of ancient Greek or Roman characters sounding as if they’ve stepped out of a Merchant Ivory production. Sicily had been colonised by mainland Greece: it made sense to me that the Greek they speak would be a bit different, the way Hiberno-English is a bit different. And Syracuse is the biggest city in Sicily, so the Dublin voice made sense. The Greek world wasn’t a monoculture: you’ve got different dialects, different classes, immigration, a massive slave trade. The language was a way to try to capture some of that difference.

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