Irish writer Paul Lynch won the 2023 Booker Prize on Sunday for his novel Prophet Song, the story of a family and a country on the brink of catastrophe
as an imaginary Irish Government veers towards tyranny.
The novel, Paul Lynch’s fifth, seeks to show the unrest in Western
democracies and their indifference towards disasters such as the implosion of
Syria.
“From that first knock at the door, Prophet Song forces us out of our
complacency as we follow the terrifying plight of a woman seeking to protect
her family in an Ireland descending into totalitarianism,” Esi Edugyan, chair
of the Booker’s 2023 judges, said.
“This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave.”
Paul Lynch, who was previously the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday
Tribune newspaper, said he wanted readers to understand totalitarianism by
heightening the dystopia with the intense realism of his writing.
“I wanted to deepen the reader’s immersion to such a degree that by the
end of the book, they would not just know, but feel this problem for
themselves,” Paul Lynch said in comments published on the Booker Prize
website.
He became the fifth Irish author to win the Booker Prize, after Iris
Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright, said the organisers of the
competition. The Northern Irish writer Anna Burns won in 2018.
Past winners of the Booker, which was first awarded in 1969 include
Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Yann Martel.
Prophet Song is published in the UK by Oneworld which also won the
prize in 2015 and 2016 with Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout.
Reuters
