Winner of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2022

Kevin Sullivan

Is this year’s winner of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize for his essay

‘In dark times, what can be done to resist the abuse of political power?’

Roy Foster, Chair of the judging panel said, "‘Dark times’ indeed sums up the state of the world in 2022, and Kevin Sullivan’s essay decisively confronts the abuse of political power which is all around us. There is something very Butlerian in the way he draws on his own experience of political and cultural life in Eastern Europe, and also in his analysis of the complicated ways that artists and intellectuals reckon with an authoritarian zeitgeist. His perspective considers the world at its widest, and the effort to ‘live in truth’ at a time when lies are widely peddled and wealth inequality dominates. This is a writer who looks honestly at his own illusions, cherished at a brighter time. But he also suggests that there is  still hope for a consensus based on reason and ethics, facing up to  the ominous  political and ecological portents around us. The judges of the HBEP unanimously agreed to award his essay the 2022 Prize  for its forceful and elegant style, its trenchant and wide-ranging conclusions, and its ability to express complex problems with a clarity that does not sacrifice subtlety."

Upon hearing the news Kevin Sullivan said, “Hubert Butler's lifelong practice of engaging with ideas on his own terms and speaking out even when silence would have been the easier and more comfortable option served as a powerful antidote to misguided assumptions that were prevalent during his lifetime. His legacy of common sense, compassion and intellectual rigour is still very much needed. It is an honour to have been awarded this prize.”

Kevin Sullivan worked as a journalist in Asia for more than a decade, reporting from Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, and other places. In 1991, he began covering the war in the former Yugoslavia. After being seriously wounded in a land-mine explosion in Bosnia in 1993, he wrote an early draft of The Longest Winter, a novel set in Sarajevo, which was published by Bonnier in 2016. Kevin has worked in Sarajevo and The Hague with the Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the International Commission on Missing Persons. His other novels include Out of the West, published by Armida Books in 2014, and The Figure in the Photograph and The Art of the Assassin, published by Allison & Busby in 2020 and 2021. Kevin and his wife, the writer and translator Marija Fekete Sullivan, live in Sarajevo.

Read Kevin’s winning essay here.

John Banville, Honorary Patron of the Prize said, "Kevin Sullivan's finely honed essay is a timely reminder that even in the world's bleakest moments - and the outlook these days is bleak indeed - there are causes for hope, and timely causes to be championed."

The prize was judged by Catriona Crowe, Roy Foster (Chair), Nicholas Grene, Eva Hoffman and Barbara Schwepcke and 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.