The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2025

About the Prize

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction is the UK’s longest running prize for comic fiction and is designed to highlight the funniest novel of the past twelve months, which best evokes the Wodehouse spirit of witty characters and perfectly timed comic prose. The prize was launched in 2000 on the 25th anniversary of the death of P.G. Wodehouse, to celebrate the launch of the Everyman Wodehouse, the first complete edition of his collected novels and stories. 2025 will mark our Silver Jubilee..

Each year, the prize celebrates the novels that have genuinely made people laugh. Publishers are implored to focus their submissions for 2025 on books that really made them laugh out loud, in order to give them the best chance of being shortlisted.

2024 Shortlisted Authors (L-R): Jen Sugden & Chris Sugden, Dolly Alderton, Andrew Hunter Murray, Kaliane Bradley, Caroline O’Donoghue, David Nicholls, Ferdia Lennon

Our Judges

David Campbell - Publisher, Everyman’s Library

Peter Florence - Director of The Conversation at St Martin in the Fields

Pippa Evans - Comedian

James Naughtie - Broadcaster and author

Justin Albert - Vice Chair, University of Wales; Chair, Rewilding Britain

Stephanie Merritt - Novelist and critic

“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.”

— FERDIA LENNON, 2024 WINNER