President Michael D. Higgins receives Guestbook Project Award for Narrative Hospitality from Professor Richard Kearney
Date: Fri 26th Sep, 2025 | 13:10
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.
Notes for Editors:
The mission of the Guestbook Project is to promote peacebuilding through storytelling. The Project believes that exchanging stories is at the heart of conflict resolution. It believes that the key to mutual understanding and reconciliation between opposed people and peoples is communication, providing a necessary supplement to the standard models of law, economics and politics. Narrative exchange calls for imagination, empathy and invention in emerging generations. If stories divide people, they can also be a powerful force of unity and mutual understanding.
Guestbook Project encourages, rewards and publicizes the most innovative narrative models for advancing peace and reconciliation.
President Michael D. Higgins held the Machnamh 100 series of seminars at Áras an Uachtaráin from December 2020 to November 20022. Through the seminars, the President inviting reflections on the War of Independence, the Treaty Negotiations, the Civil War and Partition.
Leading scholars from different backgrounds and with an array of perspectives shared their insights and thoughts on the context and events of that formative period of a century ago and on the nature of commemoration itself. The President adopted a thematic approach to each of the seminars, focusing on those areas that have received perhaps insufficient attention and others to which a fresh or deeper return may help in developing a clearer understanding of the period.
Each of the Machnamh 100 seminars is available to read, listen or view at https://president.ie/en/presidential-seminars/machnamh-100
Machnamh 100 built on the President’s extensive work during Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations that examined and explored seminal events such as the Lockout of 1913, the First World War, The Easter Rising, the Flu Pandemic, the election of 1918 and the first Dáil.
In 2017, President Higgins and Sabina launched the Irish Young Philosopher’s Award. The Award is aimed at encouraging our primary and secondary school pupils to think creatively and humanely around the critical issues and challenges that face our society today.