Irish author Paul Lynch wins 2023 Booker prize for his novel ‘Prophet Song’ amid recent clashes in Dublin

Paul Lynch who is an Irish author won the 2023 Booker prize for his fifth novel ‘Prophet Song.’ After being honoured with the award, Lynch said, “It is with immense pleasure that I bring the Booker home to Ireland.”

Last year, Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker prize for ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,’ whose story centres on Sri Lankan civil war. A novel about political conflict won the prize for the second year in a row. Lynch the fifth Irish author to win the prize while the last Irish writer Anna Burns won the award in 2018. Booker Prize is awarded to the best novel of fiction written in English and published in UK and Ireland.

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Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, one of the panel judges, described the novel as a “soul-shattering and true” story that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment.” Edugyan further said that the decision to award Lynch prize worth £50,000 was decided upon through deliberations and multiple rounds of polling that lasted “about six hours.”

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Over the influence of recent recent violence incidents in Dublin, Edugyan said judges’ decision was influenced “at some point in the discussions, maybe for a few minutes, this was introduced, this was discussed”. She further added the novel is “truly a masterful work of fiction,” reported The Guardian.

English novelist, Melissa Harrison called the novel “as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across: powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real” in her Guardian review.

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Another novelist from Belfast, Aimée Walsh in an Observer review stated, “Lynch’s dystopian Ireland reflects the reality of war-torn countries, where refugees take to the sea to escape persecution on land.” She further stated, “Prophet Song echoes the violence in Palestine, Ukraine and Syria, and the experience of all those who flee from war-torn countries,” The Guardian.

About the novel

The storyline of the book is set in imagined future Ireland that descends into oppressive rule. The story suggests that civil war leads to families’ fleeing Ireland.

The story centres on alternate Dublin where members of the newly formed secret police, established by a government proceed towards totalitarianism. The protagonist Eilish is a microbiologist who looks after her four children and her elderly father amid civil war following disappearance of her husband. Eilish’s husband, a senior official in the Teachers’ Union of Ireland goes into hiding when secret police knocks at their door.