Paul Lynch wins Booker Prize 2023 for his dystopian novel Prophet Song

Irish writer Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker Prize for his dystopian novel Prophet Song. The winning entry, which will get $63,000, is Lynch's fifth novel.

This is his first Booker Prize victory.

Terming it a soul-shattering work which the readers will not forget, the jury said it was a triumph of "emotional storytelling". 

"With great vividness, Prophet Song captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment."

The novel, set in Ireland, imagines the country descending into fascism and tells the story of a family struggling to come to terms with a terrifying new world order where democracy remains a distant memory. 

The novel's protagonist is Eilish Stack, a mother of four who answers her front door on a wet evening in Dublin to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband.  

According to Edi Edugyan, the chair of this year’s judging panel for the Booker Prize, Lynch's novel “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". 

One of the fascinating aspects of the novel is that there are no paragraph breaks and quotation marks - which evokes a sense of claustrophobia in the readers, making it all the more visceral. 

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Inspired by real political events: Lynch

After winning the prize, Lynch quipped: “Well, there goes my hard-won anonymity."

Lynch spent nearly four years writing Prophet Song and took inspiration from world events including Brexit and the rise of nationalism in Europe.

"This was not an easy book to write. The rational part of me believed I was dooming my career by writing this novel. Though I had to write the book anyway. We do not have a choice in such matters," he added.

However, Lynch maintains that he did not intend to write a political novel or a straightforwardly “speculative” one.

“How can such a novel be speculative when what is happening on these pages belongs to the here and now?” he wrote in a recent article for the Guardian. 

"I wanted to explore the nature of force, problems of choice and free will, and to pose questions about human dignity. The framing of the questions proved more important than the answers."

The Booker is open to works of fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2023.

(With inputs from agencies)