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Ireland's Paul Lynch wins 2023 Booker Prize for fiction

27 November 2023 05:08 (UTC +04:00)

Ireland's Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize 2023 for fiction on Sunday for his dystopian novel ‘Prophet Song’, a TASS correspondent reports from the ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London, APA reports.

Prophet Song, Lynch’s fifth novel, is set in an imagined Ireland in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. Eilish Stack, the novel’s protagonist, soon finds herself trying to make sense of the nightmare of a collapsing society - desperate to do whatever it takes to keep her family together.

Esi Edugyan, chair of the 2023 judges, said that the novel focuses on attempts of a woman "to protect her family in an Ireland descending into totalitarianism." "This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave. With great vividness, Prophet Song captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment. Readers will find it soul-shattering and true, and will not soon forget its warnings," she said.

Born in Limerick in 1977, Lynch launched the career of a writer in 2013. Previously he was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper and wrote regularly for The Sunday Times on cinema. His debut novel ‘Red Sky in Morning’ was published to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

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