Novelist Ferdia Lennon, author of the award-winning Glorious Exploits, and biographer Frank Shovlin, professor of Irish literature in English at the University of Liverpool, will have a public conversation on writing fiction and biography presented by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the department of English, the department of Classics, and the Creative Writing Program. During his visit to UGA, Lennon will also have a reading and conversation at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 27 in Room 125 of the Jackson Street Building as part of the UGA Humanities Festival and the Willson Center's Global Georgia public event series. The March 27 event is also part of the university'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. Lennon has also been shortlisted for the world’s largest and most prestigious literary award for young writers, the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize.

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.

Frank Shovlin is from the west of Ireland and was educated at the universities of Galway and Oxford before taking up a lectureship at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool where he is now a professor. He has published widely on a range of Irish writers, primarily from the twentieth century. In 2018–19 he was holder of a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship to work on his critically acclaimed edition of John McGahern’s letters. He is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center.