Alumni engagement and philanthropy



GRADUATE IS HUBERT BUTLER PRIZE RUNNER-UP  

28 October 2019

A Queen’s 2014 graduate, Noel Russell (MA, Creative Writing) has been awarded the runner-up prize in the prestigious Hubert Butler Essay Writing competition on the theme ‘Where does a citizen of the world belong?’

Noel (pictured right above) was presented with a cheque for £500 by novelist John Banville (left), who is Honorary Patron of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize, at a reception in the Irish Embassy in London on 23 October, 2019.

Commenting on this year’s winner and runners-up, Professor Roy Foster, Chair of the judges said: “The essays were of an impressively high standard, and we found it hard to arrive at a shortlist of four, from which the winner and three runners-up would be selected.

“But we chose essays which lived up to the Butlerian model of fitting wide-ranging intellectual explorations into an economic compass (the word-length was a strict 3000) and carrying it off with elegant style.”

Hubert Butler, (1900-1991), a Kilkenny-born essayist, historian and broadcaster, is widely regarded as one of the most important Irish writers of the twentieth century. The Prize that carries his name is intended to encourage the art of essay-writing with a European dimension and to expand interest in Butler's work.

From Belfast, Mr Russell said he was delighted to receive the prize, adding: “To have one’s writing recognised in a competition devoted to honouring the work of Hubert Butler is special.

“Butler’s work is exhilarating and inspiring, and he is a figure of international stature.”

A former BBC editor, Mr Russell was one of three runners-up in the competition, which attracted entries from Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Eastern Europe.

Organised by arts charity HEART London, the Prize promotes the best of European liberal values – values that Hubert Butler embodied. It is designed to reflect 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.

Born into an Irish Protestant family in Kilkenny in 1900, Hubert Butler was educated at Oxford and the School of Slavonic Studies in London, where he mastered Russian and Serbo-Croat. Travelling in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s gave him an early awareness of the growth of anti-Semitism, and in 1938 he went to Vienna to help hundreds of Jews escape from Nazi persecution.

Butler returned to Croatia after the Second World War, and discovered evidence of ethnic cleansing of the Orthodox Serbs with the connivance of the Catholic Church – a discovery which made him deeply unpopular with the authorities in Ireland.

He and his wife Peggy made his family home, Maidenhall, into a centre of intellectual debate, and founded the Kilkenny Lectures to encourage dialogue between the people of Northern Ireland and the Republic. He finally found recognition as an essayist of international calibre in his eighties, with his collections Escape from the Anthill, The Children of Drancy and Grandmother and Wolf Tone. He died in 1991. 

Mr Russell is a Royal Television Society-nominated television producer, a Sony Gold award-winning radio producer, a journalist with 30 years' experience of covering Northern Ireland, and a screenwriter, playwright and published fiction writer.

Throughout his career with the BBC Noel produced several radio strands including Sunday Sequence, Arts Extra, and the consumer affairs programme Your Place and Mine. He also produced several documentaries and long form interviews with figures such as poets Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Oscar winning director Terry George, and writers Colm Tóibín, Jennifer Johnston and Anthony Cronin.

The former reporter with the Irish News and Belfast Telegraph, is now a freelance writer and producer. In recent years, Mr Russell has produced television documentaries for BBC NI and TG4, including ones about civil rights in Northern Ireland 50 years after 1968, Unionist Irish language-activists, and on the writer Alice Milligan and two Belfast sisters Eleanor and Nell Corr, who travelled to Dublin to take part in the 1916 Rising.

The winning entry in this year’s competition by Andrew Hammond can be read here.

To submit graduate news items, or for general enquiries about this story, please contact Gerry Power, Communications Officer, Development and Alumni Relations Office, Queen's University Belfast or telephone: +44 (0)28 9097 5321.

 

 

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