THERE were two winners of the 1996 Ewart-Biggs prize, announced at the Mansion House in Dublin last night. Playwright Sebastian Barry and political philosopher Norman Porter share the £4,000 prize, founded in memory of the British ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, who was murdered by the IRA in 1976. Mr Barry received it for his play The Steward of Christendom, and Mr Porter for his book Rethinking Unionism: an Alternative Vision for Northern Ireland.
The historian Prof Roy Foster said Mr Barry's play was "almost unbearably moving" in its presentation of "the tangled identities and allegiances which dog our history". Mr Porter's "surprising and iconoclastic book echoes Sebastian Barry's plea for imaginative reconciliation in Ireland", he said.