Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2024

As we prepare for our 51st edition, Kilkenny Arts Festival are delighted to announce the title for this year's Hubert Butler Essay Prize. Kilkenny Arts Festival has long paid tribute to the memory of Kilkenny native Hubert Butler - one of Ireland's most respected essayists - with both the annual Hubert Butler Lecture and the Hubert Butler Essay Prize occupying keystone places in the Festival Programme.

The title for this year’s essay is:

Professor Roy Foster, chair of the judges, writes:

'The Hubert Butler Essay Prize is in its seventh year. Over a period ominously racked by global crisis and conflict, the Prize has focussed attention on themes and issues which are central both to Butler’s work, and the world today- such as frontiers, identity, the abuse of political power, coping with the pandemic, and the tension between individual and community values. Last year’s winner Shane Conneely, addressing the question 'How far can we trust science?', concluded that we can only trust it as far as we can trust each other; and trustworthiness was much in the judges’ minds when choosing a topic for 2024.
We wanted to encourage examination of the uses and abuses of history, at a time when deep-rooted antagonisms all round us have taken a particularly toxic form, and also to consider the implications of the tendency to discount ‘history’ in favour of ‘memory’.

Butler was mordantly conscious of the need to interrogate our history in order to avoid ‘bitterly recoiling into self-sufficiency, pedantry, mythology and linguistics’; the danger nowadays is by no means restricted to the small nations he was writing about. Equally relevant is the Butlerian commitment to skewering evasions and double-think in order to advance towards a form of reconciliation. Butler’s commitment to clarity of thought and his determination to face up to uncomfortable truths has never been more acutely needed, and the essay form - as he showed so consummately - remains uniquely suited for projecting this essential endeavour.'

Entries will be judged by Catriona Crowe, Roy Foster (Chair), Nicholas Grene and Barbara Haus Schwepcke. The first prize will be €1,500, with two second prizes of €500 each.

Submissions are now open and the closing date is 28 June 2024. The prize giving ceremony will be held in Kilkenny in August 2024. For terms and conditions and to apply please visit hubertbutleressayprize.com

Kilkenny Arts Festival became the permanent home of the Prize in 2021. Shane Conneely, the recipient of the prize in 2024, was presented the award in a ceremony in the Parade Tower in Kilkenny Castle, as part of the 2023 Kilkenny Arts Festival. You can read Shane's full essay ‘How far can we trust science?’ here. The Presentation featured a speech by Diarmuid Ferriter, which you can read here.

Founded by Jeremy O'Sullivan in 2018, the Hubert Butler Essay Prize encourages the art of essay-writing across Europe. The prize is designed to reflect Hubert Butler’s interest in the common ground between the European nation states that emerged after the First World War; his concern with the position of religious and ethnic minorities; his life and writings as an encapsulation of the mantra ‘Think globally, act locally’; the importance of the individual conscience and his work with refugees.

Hubert Butler was born in Kilkenny in 1900, and he travelled extensively throughout Europe during his life. With his wife, Peggy, he founded the Kilkenny Lectures to encourage dialogue between the people of Northern Ireland and the Republic, and he found international recognition in his eighties for his essay collections Escape from the Anthill, The Children of Drancy, and Grandmother and Wolfe Tone.