Uachtarán na hÉireann, President Michael D. Higgins was today honoured with the Guestbook Project Award for Narrative Hospitality at an event in Áras an Uachtaráin.
The award was presented to the President by the founder director of Guestbook, the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, Professor Richard Kearney.
The event featured a discussion between President Higgins and Professor Kearney about how the President’s life and work has reflected the art of 'narrative hospitality' - as both a poetics of imagination and an ethics of openness to strangers.
The discussion included Michael D. Higgins’ work as President, as poet and as politician, as well as his work fostering the exchanging of histories and narratives through a process of ethical remembrance in the Machnamh 100 series of seminars to mark the centenaries of the foundational events of a century ago, and throughout the Decade of Centenaries.
The President and Professor Kearney further discussed the multiple ways we narrate the past, including the different roles played by history and by different forms of storytelling including fiction, poetry, art, drama and film.
The event was attended by a number of academics from relevant disciplines in Irish universities.
President Higgins is the fourth recipient of the Guestbook Project Award for Narrative Hospitality. The three previous recipients were former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson in 2022, the late broadcaster and host of ‘A Celtic Sojourn’ Brian O’Donovan in 2023, and author Colum McCann in 2024.
