The day I shopped for hair products with Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch

Since winning the Booker Prize last November for his book Prophet Song, Irish novelist Paul Lynch has conducted over 200 interviews, public events and photo shoots, from Italy to India and New York to New Zealand.

By now he’s a pro at the pose as much as the prose. But when he arrived this week for his appearance on Friday at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, he’d left one crucial component behind in his hotel room after his appearance at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on Monday night: hair product.

Booker Prize 2023 winner Paul Lynch in Sydney.Credit: Steven Siewert

It’s not every day a reporter gets the chance to go shopping with a Booker winner, so I jumped at the chance to accompany him to the local Priceline pharmacy to pick up a bottle of Frizz Ease, to help tame his tresses (despite appearances to the contrary he has natural curly locks.)

Shopping in a mall is much like one of the domestic scenes portrayed in his dystopian novel, where his protagonist Eilish Stack, a scientist and mother of four, goes about her daily home life while the world around her descends into totalitarianism.

It’s as surreal for me as winning the $96,000 award for the best work of fiction in the English language has been for this former journalist turned five-time novelist.

“Sometimes I have to sit down and take stock about what’s happened to my life the past six months. I’m a writer who never thought that a prize of this scale would come their way. Don’t get me wrong. I did dream about it. But I was always in the corners doing my thing. I’m not necessarily built for the mainstream. And now I look around, and I’m at the centre of the culture.

“I’m not necessarily built for the mainstream”: Lynch is in Australia this week.Credit: Steven Siewert

“I remember just after I won the Booker I was stopped at a red light in my working-class suburb in Dublin and I just thought, ‘I know that Paul Lynch just won the Booker Prize. I know that I’m Paul Lynch. But I’m not sure that I won’.”

The day after he won, there were 3000 pieces of media with his name in it, which Ireland’s sixth Booker winner says was an “adjustment and an honour”. Now considered a “chieftain for the arts”, his win coincides with what he sees as a cultural renaissance in his homeland, which produced four writers on last year’s Booker longlist.

“In the UK they closed down 800 libraries in the past decade. In Ireland, we open libraries, we fund writers and give them bursaries. Writers are thriving now, and Ireland has become a post-Catholic culture. We are very progressive.”

For someone who has conjured up a dark vision of Irish society sliding into authoritarianism, he is surprisingly light and upbeat in person.

Lynch celebrates his novel Prophet Song winning the Booker Prize in November.Credit: Getty Images

As we chat over chips in a yellow-tiled Aussie pub, he speaks breathlessly, like the way he writes. Prophet Song deploys run-on sentences without paragraph breaks, “pulling off feats of language that are stunning to witness”, the Booker judges said after his win.

Growing up a bookworm of a boy in Donegal in Ireland’s far north, Lynch said his parents – his mother an English teacher, his father in the coast guard – arranged for him to get a job at a secondhand bookstore at 11, to keep him in books. As a difficult teen, he was kicked out of his English honours class, until his teachers banded together to convince the principal to reinstate him.

“How lucky I am for that. Because that reading age at 16, 17, 18 imprints you. I remember sitting on a bed weeping after reading [Thomas Hardy’s] The Mayor of Casterbridge, and I’d never felt that way before ... that a book could cut you to the bone like that. I’ve been chasing that hit ever since.”

At 19, he left university for journalism, working on the now-defunct Sunday Tribune as a sub-editor, then a film critic because he felt he was too introverted to be a reporter. For 15 years he’s been “eking out a living” writing fiction, which is now compared to classics of the dystopian genre such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

But what the single father of two children, aged 5 and 9, has been struck by in his post-win travels, is how readers – from Syria, to Palestine and Ukraine – tell him the slide into fascism depicted in his book, is occurring in real life.

“I’m not a political scientist, I’m just a guy in Ireland making shit up, yet somehow this story seems to speak to multiple political realities around the world,” he said.

Lynch will appear at two events on Friday as part of the Sydney Writers Festival.

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