An author and archaeologist in Galway has won the prestigious Michel Déon prize for non fiction.
Former University of Galway academic, John Waddell, scooped the prize at an event in Dublin’s Royal Irish Academy in early October.
His 2026 book, The Celtic World: a history, from Four Courts Press, is an exploration of how understandings of the ancient Celts, and the concept of a European-wide world inhabited by Celtic-speaking peoples, has developed up to modern times.
Since 2018, the Michel Déon award went, with its €10,000 prize, to a single author, but this year it was awarded to Waddell and Maurice J Casey for Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals from Footnote Press.
Waddell has interrogated the study of a Celtic past, from Ireland to the Black Sea. It has often been a disputed and debated territory, and for centuries the true story of these ancient Celtic-speakers was obscured by fanciful origin myths.
Linguistic studies and archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth century began to expose a rich and complex narrative that is still being clarified today, including dramatic finds in France and Germany.
These were people who have bequeathed a remarkable archaeological heritage, an astonishing art style, several living languages, and, - in Irish and Welsh - the most substantial body of early written texts in a non-Latin tongue in western Europe.
The prize was presented by RIA president, Professor Daniel Carey, and by Eugene Downes, cultural director with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The ceremony was attended by the French ambassador to Ireland, Céline Place, and featured a lecture by the winner of the 2025 Académie Française Michel Déon Prize, Fabrice Humbert.
Waddell is a former Professor of Archaeology in the University of Galway. His books include Archaeology and Celtic myth, and Pagan Ireland: ritual and belief in another world.
The Michel Déon Prize was founded in 2018 in memory of the French writer Michel Déon (1919-2016 ) who made the West of Ireland his home. It is a joint prize awarded in alternate years by the Royal Irish Academy in Ireland (funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs ) and the Académie française in France. The winning author receives a prize of €10,000 and the honour of visiting France or Ireland respectively to deliver the Michel Déon Lecture the following year.
