Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker Prize, worth £50,000 for his book Prophet Song.
Chair of Judges, Esi Edugyan, described the winning book as ‘soul-shattering and true’, adding that readers ‘will not soon forget its warnings’.
Prophet Song was the bookmakers’ favourite to win the Booker Prize with Paul Lynch saying of the book, ‘Prophet Song is partly an attempt at radical empathy. 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’.
READ OUR BOOK REVIEW OF PROPHET SONG
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE BOOKOn a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband, Larry, a trade unionist for the Teachers’ Union of Ireland. Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny.
And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Lynch is the internationally-acclaimed, prize-winning author of four novels: BEYOND THE SEA, GRACE, THE BLACK SNOW and RED SKY IN MORNING, and the winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2018.
His debut novel RED SKY IN MORNING was published to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic in 2013. It was a finalist for France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) and was nominated for the Prix du Premier Roman (First Novel Prize).
THE BLACK SNOW (2014) was an Amazon.com Book of the Month. In France it won the French booksellers’ prize Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and the inaugural Prix des Lecteurs Privat. It was nominated for the Prix Femina and the Prix du Roman Fnac (Fnac Novel Prize).
GRACE was published in 2017 to massive international acclaim. It won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize. In France it was shortlisted for the Prix Jean Monnet for European Literature, among other prizes.
BEYOND THE SEA was published in September 2019 to wide critical acclaim in the UK, Ireland, Australia and the US. It was chosen as a book of the year in the Irish Independent by Sebastian Barry. In 2021, it was published to wide acclaim in France where it won the 2022 Prix Gens de Mers.
Paul Lynch was born in Limerick in 1977, grew up in Co Donegal, and lives in Dublin. He was previously the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007 to 2011, and wrote regularly for The Sunday Times on cinema. He is a full-time novelist.
