The Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award

Bob Hughes

Inaugurated in 2008, The Lifetime Achievement Award bears the name of one of Ireland’s great booksellers, Bob Hughes, in recognition of the Hughes family’s massive contribution to the success of The Irish Book Awards.

Previous winners Seamus Heaney and Edna O'Brien

The citation for the award reads:

Booksellers, like readers and critics, have favourite writers.  Any book sold keeps Yeats’s “greasy till” chiming but there are certain writers whose work booksellers actively enjoy recommending and selling to their customers. The work is the important thing but the personal connection between booksellers and author is perhaps equally so.  Booksellers warm to authors who, in the words of Gray’s Elegy, keep “the noiseless tenor of their way”, who fulfil the peripheral demands of public profile and trade interaction with good grace. It is those good friends of the book trade that our Lifetime Achievement Award is designed to honour.

Past winners include the late John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O’Brien and most recently, Seamus Heaney.