Irish Times journalist Sally Hayden moved to Beirut in January 2024. Since then, she has travelled twice across the occupied West Bank; lived through and reported on the war in Lebanon; and crossed the border into Syria the day after the Assad regime fell, returning multiple times since.
For this year’s Hubert Butler Lecture, she shares experiences and reflections from the past year, talking about the people she met along the way, the wrongdoing and the goodness she has witnessed, while illustrating the talk with her own photographs.
Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist, photographer and author. She has reported all over the world for a wide array of outlets, including VICE, CNN International, TIME, the BBC, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek and Al Jazeera. Her first book, ‘My Fourth Time, We Drowned’ - about the treatment of refugees trying to seek safety in Europe - won the Orwell Prize for political writing; An Post Irish Book of the Year; the Michel Déon Prize; Il Premio Terzani; and Il Premio Inge Feltrinelli, while being named a book of the year by the New Yorker, the Financial Times and the Guardian, among many others. Her second book will be published in April 2026.
The Hubert Butler Annual Lecture was established in 2007 to honour the Kilkenny writer, historian and broadcaster whose remarkable consistency of vision and clarity of mind made him unique among essayists and whose work evinced an unsurpassed moral, political and literary integrity.
