Dystopian novel about Ireland’s descent into far-right terror wins Booker Prize

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, Lynch’s fifth, seeks to show the unrest in Western democracies and their indifference towards disasters such as the implosion of Syria.

Paul Lynch’s prose in Prophet Song is spiky, furious, relentless and prescient.Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images

“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,” Canadian writer Esi Edugyan, chair of the Booker’s 2023 judges, said.

“This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave.”

Lynch, 46, 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,” Lynch said in comments published on the Booker Prize website.

The five prize judges met to pick the winner on Saturday, less than 48 hours after far-right violence erupted in Dublin following a stabbing attack on a group of children.

Edugyan, author of Washington Black, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, said that immediate events didn’t directly influence the choice of winner. She said that Lynch’s book “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment” but also deals with “timeless” themes.

The other finalists were Irish writer Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting; American novelist Paul Harding’s This Other Eden; Canadian author Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience; US writer Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You; and British author Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane.

Edugyan said the book was “a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave” in which Lynch “pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness”. She said the choice of winner wasn’t unanimous, but the six-hour judges’ meeting wasn’t acrimonious.

From left, authors Paul Lynch, Jonathan Escoffery, Chetna Maroo, Paul Murray, Paul Harding and Sarah Bernstein take a selfie during a photo call for the Booker Prize 2023 in London.Credit: AP

“We all ultimately felt that this was the book that we wanted to present to the world and that this was truly a masterful work of fiction,” she said.

Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to English-language novels from any country published in the UK and Ireland and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel.

Lynch becomes the fifth Irish author to win, after Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright, the organisers of the competition said.

The Northern Irish writer Anna Burns won in 2018.

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.

Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize last year for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Reuters, AP

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