INTRODUCTION

HUBERT BUTLER ESSAY PRIZE 2022

Nicholas Grene

When the five judges of the 2022 Hubert Butler Essay Prize learned the name of the author of the essay which we had unanimously agreed was the winner, there was something of a gasp audible on our Zoom call: Kevin Sullivan.  ‘No’, we are reassured by Jeremy O’Sullivan, the founder and wonderfully efficient administrator of the Prize, ‘he’s no relation: note the distinguishing ‘O’ before the Sullivan’.  We were delighted to discover that the journalist and novelist Kevin Sullivan was originally from Glasgow, though now based in Sarajevo, and we welcome him and his wife Marija to Kilkenny. 

            Judging the Hubert Butler Essay Prize is always a fascinating task. Essays come to us anonymously, out of nowhere, so to speak.  They tackle the subject for the year in extraordinarily different ways, sometimes writing out of very personal experience, sometimes pursuing hobbyhorses of their own.  The five of us often differ in opinion on the less successful entrants.  But we are rarely in any doubt when it comes to the winners.  From the very first sentence of Kevin Sullivan’s essay there was a thoughtfulness, intelligence and quiet assurance that rang out unmistakably.

            It surely would have been very gratifying to Butler, so invested as he was in uncovering the truth about the dark times of the Balkans in the Second World War, that Kevin brings to the topic so much knowledge of that part of the world.  He is able to show tellingly, for example, how the Yugoslav writers Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović managed to negotiate their own times of restricted free speech.  But what is so impressive in his essay is the sheer reach of his illustrations.  He is fully aware of our own dark times from the war in Ukraine through the political crises of Sri Lanka to the global threats of climate change and economic injustice.  Yet he can set against this Vaclav Havel’s belief in truth, Volodymyr Zelensky’s past as an irreverent comedian, the resistance represented by the Argentinian singer-songwriter Victor Heredia.  He witnessed first-hand the defiance of the people of Sarajevo under assault in 1992.  In an essay that is notable for its even-handedness and balance, he can nonetheless affirm positively in its conclusion: ‘Dark times are illuminated by art and by truth and by humour’.

            What is required for a successful entry in the Hubert Butler Essay Prize?  What makes it different from a newspaper op ed, say?  The answer is the capacity for reflectiveness, and the writing.  Kevin begins his essay with the all-important caution: ‘There is a perpetual temptation to attribute disproportionate significance to the present’.  That is what so many newspaper articles and editorials do.   By contrast, in this essay as in Butler’s own, there is always a longer historical and wider spatial perspective. And in this essay, as in Butler’s, every sentence, every paragraph has its full crisp force.  Though the argument may appear to digress, as readers we are never in doubt that it is has its defined shape and purpose.  That is what holds us in the essays of Hubert Butler and that is the skill so finely demonstrated in our 2022 prizewinning essay.

Nicholas Grene
Judge, Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2022