Posted 28 May 2014
UCD commemorates alumna Maeve Binchy with travel award for creative writing
To commemorate one of Ireland’s best-loved writers Maeve Binchy and her love of travel, the UCD School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin has inaugurated the Maeve Binchy Travel Award. The annual award, valued at €4,000, funds a UCD student to pursue a novel travel opportunity that will enhance her or his creative writing talent.
The inaugural award was presented to UCD creative writing MFA student Henrietta McKervey [on 27 May] to mark the anniversary of Maeve Binchy’s birthday [today 28 May].
Henrietta, who read her first Maeve Binchy novel Light a Penny Candle at thirteen years of age, will use the award to travel the BBC Radio 4 Shipping Forecast: a series of weather reports from thirty-one areas around the British Isles beginning off the coast of Norway and ending in the icy waters off Southeast Iceland.
Pictured at the presentation of the Maeve Binchy Travel Award in UCD’s Newman House, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin (l-r): Mr Niall MacMonagle, teacher and critic, and member of the selection committee; Professor Margaret Kelleher, Chair of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin, and Chair of the selection committee for the Maeve Binchy Travel Award; Ms Aine Gibbons, UCD vice-president for development; Mr James Ryan, lecturer at the UCD School of English, Drama, and Film; Henrietta McKervey, recipient of the Maeve Binchy Travel Award; and Mr Gordon Snell, scriptwriter and author, and husband of Maeve Binchy
“The last nightly broadcast at 00:48 is hypnotic, a lullaby. A ritual of reassurance that all is in order, that we are safe,” said Henrietta.
”Her determination to travel was crucial to the launch of Maeve Binchy’s writing career; Henrietta, a gifted writer, will follow in her footsteps with this thrilling project. We all look forward to reading its results,” said Professor Margaret Kelleher, Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin, and Chair of the Selection Committee for the Maeve Binchy Travel Award.
Maeve Binchy completed a Bachelor of Arts (BA) Degree and a Higher Diploma in Education (HDip Ed) at University College Dublin before working as a teacher at various schools in Dublin. She then wrote for the Irish Times and was appointed Women’s Editor in 1968.
The young Maeve was keen to spend her holidays in “far flung places” like “on the decks of boats, or working in kibbutzim in Israel or minding children as camp counselors in the United States”.
She would greatly amuse her family with her letters home which gave vivid accounts of her adventures abroad.
“My parents were so impressed with these eager letters from abroad they got them typed and sent them to a newspaper and that’s how I became a writer,” she once said.
Maeve Binchy’s first novel, Light a Penny Candle, was published in 1982. She wrote a further 16 novels, several of which including Circle of Friends and Tara Road were made into feature films.
Speaking to the Irish Times shortly before her death, Maeve said, “I don’t have any regrets about any roads I didn’t take.”
Maeve Binchy died peacefully aged 72 on 30 July 2012. Her husband Gordon Snell was by her side.
(Produced by UCD University Relations)
