Sally Hayden has been awarded the 2022 Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction for her debut book My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route (4th Estate) by the Royal Irish Academy at a prize ceremony in the Mansion House, Dublin this evening.
The €10,000 prize is the second major award that the journalist has won for her debut book this year. In July, she won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022.
My Fourth Time, We Drowned investigates the migrant crisis across North Africa. Hayden shows how refugees face enslavement and trafficking, torture and murder, tuberculosis, drowning and sexual abuse. She also illuminates how incarceration and human rights disaster can come as a direct result of European policy, exposing the negligence of NGOs, the corruption of the United Nations and the economics of the 21st-century slave trade.
Prof Michael Cronin, chair of the Royal Irish Academy’s judging committee said: “Sally Hayden’s work is a vivid, harrowing and compelling account of human destitution, about what happens when Europe turns its back on African refugees seeking to flee the twin horrors of persecution and hunger. Hayden shares with the other shortlisted authors - Nicholas Canny, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Rosaleen McDonagh, Susan McKay, and Sophie White - a remarkable ability to give voice and bear witness to the many forms of exclusion, both past and present, in the private lives and public debates of our society.”
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Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, a fellow Orwell Prize winner, wrote: “Sally Hayden’s heart-stopping account of the plight of contemporary refugees is both a compelling epic and an intimate encounter with exact personal experience. She achieves what all great writing hopes to do — the restoration of humanity to those who have been deprived of it. This is a vital book for anyone who wants to feel what it means to be human in the 21st century.”
Hayden is an award-winning journalist and photographer, who writes regularly for The Irish Times and other international media outlets on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises. A UCD law graduate with an MSc in International Politics from Trinity College, Dublin, she won the prize for foreign coverage of the year at the 2019 Newsbrands Irish Journalism Awards.
Michel Déon was one of the most innovative and reflective French writers of the 20th century. He lived in Ireland from the 1970s until his death in 2016. The Michel Déon Prize was created in 2018 to honour Déon’s legacy and is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs. It is awarded in France every second year by the Académie française. Hayden give the Michel Déon Lecture in France next year.
