The Hubert Butler Essay Prize

The Vice President for Global Engagement, Dr Emma Stokes, invites you to a special evening, celebrating the Hubert Butler Essay Prize and the winning entrant, Trinity academic, Dr Conor Daly.

The Hubert Butler Essay Prize is now in its seventh year and Trinity Global is delighted to be able to support and celebrate this initiative established by Jeremy O’Sullivan. It is judged by Dr Catriona Crowe, Prof Roy Foster (Chair), Dr Nicholas Grene, and Dr Barbara Schwepcke. The prize is sponsored by the Kilkenny Arts Festival and the award ceremony forms part of the festival's programme. The key objective of the prize is to create a space in the literary marketplace for the essay form honouring Hubert Butler.

Hubert Butler (23 October 1900 – 5 January 1991) was an Irish essayist from Bennettsbridge, Co Kilkenny, who wrote on a wide range of topics spanning local history and archaeology, to the political and religious affairs of eastern Europe before and during World War II. He witnessed at first hand the revolutionary fervour of the late 1920s in Leningrad, now St Petersburg. He also travelled to Nazi Austria on his own initiative and at his own expense and helped save Jews from being sent to concentration camps.

The 2024 winner of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize, Dr Conor Daly is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (Russian and Ancient Greek; Theoretical Linguistics). He has a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral dissertation was in the field of cultural semiotics (the development of Russian scholarly prose) but his research interests include the history of the Russian language in Alaska, Jewish intellectual life in the Russian Empire and the image of the dissident in Soviet culture.

Since 2019 Conor has been a Visiting Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow at Trinity College Dublin where he lectures and tutors on Central and East European area studies, translation, literature and film. He organised the weekly public lecture series Understanding Europe's East, held at TCD in the spring of 2024. He has chaired sessions on Russia and Ukraine at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co. Donegal. As ‘Conchubhar Ó Dálaigh’ he is a regular contributor on Eastern European affairs for Raidió na Gaeltachta. He is currently learning Ukrainian.

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