Winner of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2024

‘With narratives of conflict currently distorted by misinformation and the substitution of memory for history, what are the chances of reconciliation?’

DR CONOR DALY

“Conor Daly's essay is timely, insightful and elegantly written - and the things he has to say are, simply, right.” John Banville, Honorary Patron of the Prize

Prof Roy Foster’s Speech at the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2024 Award Ceremony

“It is wonderful to be back in the beautiful Parade Tower, in Hubert Butler’s city, together with a company that includes members of his family, particularly his daughter Julia and son-in-law Dick. I must warmly thank Olga and her team for the Festival’s stellar support for this Prize, Jeremy O’Sullivan for dreaming it up, and keeping us up to the mark, and my fellow judges Nicky Grene, Catriona Crowe and Barbara Schwepcke for their unstinting labours and  rapier-sharp judgement. And above all I salute the enduring spirit of the great man himself, a continuing inspiration.

“After seven years and hundreds of entries, the Hubert Butler Essay Prize is now established enough for us to take stock. A key objective, ever since it was just a gleam in Jeremy’s eagle eye, was to create a space in the literary marketplace for the essay form, and to celebrate Hubert Butler’s achievement in showing just how an essay could be formulated, directed and sent out into the world to hit its readership like a bullseye. This process is a more knotty question than might be assumed. A novel can be written like a bird creating a nest: building out thickening layers of  accretion from a fundamental core. (Indeed, it might be said that too many novels are indeed written like that; you can’t repeat Tristram Shandy, or at least you shouldn’t try.) But an essay needs to be constructed like a bird flying home; with the odd dip and swoop, but a firmly concentrated sense of direction and  ultimate outcome. However, the route can still allow for creative diversion. That is how Hubert Butler wrote, as he described in a 1943 letter to an editor who had found one of his pieces obscure:

As I felt fairly certain where I wanted to get,  and there wasn’t much space, my idea was to hustle the reader (for his own good) past all the turns and forks and not picnic at each cross-roads and take him into my confidence. That would have been a different kind of journey. I was quite ready to make it, but not in that article… I usually find indirect methods the best and have sympathy with the man who gave his son a good slap so that he would remember having seen a salamander.

“The way Butler used indirection ‘to find direction out’ was nonetheless highly disciplined; the arguments could be buttressed by sharp personal insights, vivid anecdotes, and unforgettable snatches of dialogue, but the bird flew home as straight as an arrow.

“He also had the gift of  connecting current and past crises, without ever simplifying the context; and since 2017 the committee who organise the Essay Prize have tried to sustain this kind of connection. Over a period ominously racked by global crisis and conflict, we have tried to focus attention on themes and issues which are central both to Butler’s work, and the world today. Thus the subject-titles have invoked frontiers, identity, the abuse of political power, coping with pandemics, 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 our 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’. Thus canonical essays about the wartime history of the Balkans such as ‘The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue’ forensically examine the evasions and self-serving amnesia that blanketed over the terrible fate visited on Orthodox Christians by Pavelić’s Nazi-collaborationist government, despite the wealth of evidence recording it. A decade after the war ended, Butler wrote:

Speed of communications has increased, and we are expected to have strong feelings about an infinite series of remote events. But our powers of understanding and sympathy have not correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially heated emotionalism truth simply dissolves into expediency. This shifting current of expediency may be illustrated by a chronicle of the changing attitudes to Pavelić in the last ten years….In one way or another the memory of a terrible crime against humanity is being confused and effaced, so that many people believe that it never happened at all or that it has been monstrously exaggerated.

“This was uncannily prophetic in 1956.

“In an even earlier essay of 1947, ‘The Last Izmerenje’, Butler recorded observing in 1937 an extraordinary ritual of forgiveness between two families in a mountain village in Montenegro. The objective was to end a vendetta by following an ancient  procedure of expiation, carefully worked out by precedent. While acutely conscious that this procedure was archaic and doomed to extinction, he pointed out that ‘most European law is based on compensation and punishment; justice is important but it is also impersonal. Montenegrin custom on the other hand takes into account forgiveness which English justice ignores, and because of that, when “izmerenje” passes away, as pass it must, an important element of justice will have gone with it.’ It’s a remarkable essay, bringing the vectors of conflict, history and reconciliation together through a vivid, pointed and wickedly funny personal account.

“Our essay subject this year therefore invoked some key Butler preoccupations, by asking. ‘With narratives of conflict currently distorted by misinformation and the substitution of memory for history, what are the chances of reconciliation?' The twenty-seven entries approached the topic in a wide variety of ways, some making direct reference to Butler’s writing. Several chose to address the questions of memory, history, conflict and reconciliation in a directly autobiographical mode, with varying success. While the upheavals of European history and conflict featured, the essays more predominantly tackled the ongoing tragedy of Palestine and Israel, and (especially when considering misinformation and historical distortion), Putin’s Russia. Occasional entries made us think of last year’s subject (‘How far can we trust science?”) by being clearly midwifed through artificial Intelligence- though they were very few, and very easily identified. Some entries were heavily oriented towards philosophy, with  name-checks from  Heidegger and Kant to Foucault and Nussbaum; rather to my surprise only one person referred to Pierre Nora, the doyen of history-and-memory studies (and mentor to President Macron, for better or worse). There was a wide variety of styles, and an equally varied approach to typographical checks, leading one person to relate marine climate change  to “rising seal levels’, which I rather liked. Overall, there was a sense of engagement, commitment and combativeness which cheered us, and we ended our reading convinced that the essay form is alive and kicking.

“In choosing three front-runners we turned out to be very much of a mind. Niamh Cullen’s reflective essay on ‘Bomb Shelters in Belfast’ was tellingly subtitled ‘the uneasy consolations of history’. It focussed on the selective memory of war and the dominance of certain narratives in history, relating these issues to the life of a radical Irishwoman caught in the flux of World War II in Italy and France. The author made incisive points about the current nostalgic preoccupation with the struggles of 1939-1945, at the expense of facing up to the horrors unfolding around us now.

“Maurice Fitzpatrick‘s essay also begins with World War II, starting with the massacre of the Czech village Lidice by the Nazis and the manipulation by later generations of the received view of his terrible event.  The essay expanded to take in similarly prescriptive ‘official’ approaches to Polish history, the current rewriting of Gandhi’s achievement by Hindu fundamentalists, France’s uneasy relationship with the Vichy years, and Japan’s with its wartime history. Overall, the complexity and contradictions of history are posited against the determination of states to impose a preferred ‘record’, not excepting our own island in the wake of the Good Friday and St Andrew’s Agreements. Fitzpatrick mordantly surveys the agreed narrative presented in cinema and television treatments, as well as formulated by governments, and suggests that nuance and ambiguity receive short shrift thereby. He closes with an imaginative flourish, suggesting that artistic creativity might  supply a more illuminating route to recognising the uncomfortable complexity that is a necessary precondition to reconciliation.

“Finally Conor Daly’s powerful piece starts with his own memories of living in the USSR, a half-century after Butler’s sojourn in St Petersburg. He richly evokes the student world during the Brezhnev years, and the pulsing desire of the younger generation to ‘live in truth’ (Vaclav Havel’s great phrase). ‘They knew that such an authentic history existed somewhere. They had read snatches of it in samizdat and tamizdat or heard about it from the so-called ‘enemy voices’ (the shortwave radio broadcasts of Radio Liberty and other forbidden stations in the ‘rotten West’). For these Moscow friends of mine their own memory, their personal and family stories took primacy over any official narrative.’ Written with notable vividness and punch, Daly‘s essay probes the way that memories of tyranny and oppression shape reactions to the present as well as the past, brought into focus by the all too brief re-set of the Gorbachev years. In conclusion, he skewers the misuses of history in contemporary Russia and the state of ‘memory wars’ in the Russian public sphere. His essay, spicing acute observation and argument with illuminating personal insights,  is Butlerian in more ways than one. 

“I now hand over to Olivia O’Leary, doyenne of Irish journalists, who has for many years flown a flag for telling uncomfortable facts, raising difficult questions, and working  indefatigably towards that elusive goal of helping us all in Ireland to “Live in truth”. No better woman to present the 2024 Hubert Butler Essay Prize. Thank you.”

On being awarded the prize Dr Conor Daly wrote: “It is a great honour to have been awarded this year’s Hubert Butler Essay Prize.  Were it not for this prize, another decade or so might have elapsed before I ever encountered the maverick and impish kindred spirt of Hubert Butler, whose life path echoes uncannily in so many ways with my own. 

Just as ‘a cat may look at a king’, so I will risk listing a few of those similarities here…

Read Conor’s winning essay here.

The prize was judged by Catriona Crowe, Roy Foster (Chair), Nicholas Grene, 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.