2024 Hitchens Prize - Errol Morris

On April 10th, 2024, the celebrated documentarian Errol Morris was awarded the 2024 Hitchens Prize, at a ceremony in New York City.

Errol Morris’s long career as a filmmaker and writer has been as varied as it is distinguished. Common to much of his work, however, is a vigorous and searching interest in interrogating ideas, individuals, and stories that might otherwise go unexamined.

In honoring Morris, Foundation President Dennis Ross echoed the qualities his work shares with previous winners of the Hitchens Prize: “free expression’s champions, individuals who by word and deed show the value of tolerance, dialogue, and intellectual integrity.”

Mr. Morris's acceptance speech can be read on the websites of the Hitchens Prize media co-sponsors, Airmail and The Atlantic Magazine.

“Many of us are trying to investigate the world around us,” Morris said. “When we think of an investigation, we think of finding out something that we didn’t know or confirming something that we might have believed without being sure whether it was true or false. But are we lying to ourselves? Is it a myth? We interview other people, talk to other people, interact with other people so we can secure our pre-existing beliefs rather than find out anything different or discover things that might challenge those beliefs. In short, we live in a hopelessly solipsistic world.”

The value of these investigations—typified by so much of his own work—is “to break out of solipsism and pursue a truth we don’t really know, even if it’s a truth about ourselves.”