Irish writer Paul Lynch wins Booker Prize with dystopian Prophet Song

LONDON – When Paul Lynch, an Irish writer, started work on his fifth novel, he was thinking about the long civil war in Syria and the West’s apparent indifference to the people who fled the conflict.

So he crafted a book which could bring that plight home.

That novel,

Prophet Song, which imagines a near-future Ireland descending into totalitarianism,

then a civil war that leads to families fleeing the country, has won the Booker Prize, the prestigious literary award.

On Nov 26, Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, chair of the 2023 judging panel, said Prophet Song resonated with contemporary crises including the Israel-Hamas war, but won solely on its literary merits.

“This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave,” she said in a news conference before the announcement.

The judges were not unanimous in their decision, even after six hours of debate, Edugyan said. Still, she added, the panel felt that Prophet Song was a worthy winner that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment”.

Prophet Song, which Grove Atlantic is set to publish in North America on Dec 5, a week earlier than planned, beat five other shortlisted titles, including Irish author Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, British-Indian author Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane and American author Paul Harding’s This Other Eden.

The other shortlisted novels were American writer Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, and Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein’s Study For Obedience.

Founded in 1969, the Booker comes with a cash prize of £50,000 (S$84,400) and is awarded annually to the best novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland.

Previous winners include literary giants such as Hilary Mantel, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, although the prize is also known for helping to create stars. In 2022, Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka won for The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida, a novel examining the trauma of his country’s civil war.

Lynch, 46, a former movie critic, made his literary debut in 2013 with Red Sky In Morning, set in the 19th century, about an Irishman who flees to America after killing a man. His other novels include Beyond The Sea, about two men stranded offshore, and Grace, set during an Irish famine.

Ms Katherine Grant, reviewing that book in The New York Times, joked that “it’s not difficult to tell the difference between Paul Lynch’s writing and a ray of sunshine”. Lynch has “an undiminished appetite for the depiction of suffering”, she added.

Prophet Song is set in a near future and centres on Eilish Stack, a scientist and mother of four, whose trade unionist husband is taken by the security forces, an early sign of growing authoritarian rule that eventually sees Ireland in the midst of a civil war.

The novel has received mixed reviews in Britain and Ireland.

Ms Lucy Popescu in The Financial Times said it was “a compassionate, propulsive and timely novel that forces the reader to imagine – what if this was me?” Ms Aimee Walsh, in The Observer, called it “a crucial book for our current times”, and Ms Laura Hackett, in The Times of London, labelled it “an exercise in totalitarianism-by-numbers”.

Mr Anthony Cummins said in The Guardian that there was “something almost obscenely decadent” about the book’s recasting of sea-crossing refugees as middle-class Europeans. But “whatever else it is, Prophet Song is a novel to argue about”.

The 2023 Booker judges, in their six hours of deliberations, perhaps proved that point.

“There was a different way that things could have gone,” Edugyan said in the news conference. Ultimately, she added, the judges all “felt that this was the book that we wanted to present to the world – that this was truly a masterful work of fiction”. NYTIMES