Irish author Paul Lynch won this year’s Booker Prize for his dystopian novel Prophet Song.
He accepted the award, at a glittering ceremony at Old Billingsgate, for his fifth novel which follows protagonist Eilish Stack as she struggles to protect her family in an Ireland slowly tipping into totalitarianism.
Speaking at the ceremony, he said: “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 also thanked “all the children of this world who need our protection, yet have lived, and continue to live through the terrors depicted in this book”.
“Thank you so very much,” Lynch added. “It is with immense pleasure that I bring the Booker home to Ireland.”
The chair of this year’s judging panel novelist Esi Edugyan, herself twice shortlisted for the £50,000 prize, praised Lynch for “flinching from nothing, depicting the reality of state violence and displacement, and offering no easy consolations.”
She said the judges “felt unsettled from the start [of Prophet Song], submerged in, and haunted by, the sustained claustrophobia of Lynch's powerfully constructed world.”
The winning novel is very much of its time, taking the reader deeply inside the refugee experience and detailing Stack’s race to find safety outside of Ireland’s borders, an Ireland of such grinding oppression that taking to the waters might prove far less perilous than staying on dry land, but Edugyan was at pains to point out the judges were looking for a tome that encapsulated an air of “timelessness”.
“And, you know, Paul Lynch's book was certainly of that ilk, we're dealing with the timeless themes of repression, and that impulse to always save one’s family, and of familial love having to endure during difficult times,” she said.
“Obviously, these are themes that we're seeing on a grand scale playing out in the world politically today…and I will admit that this was something that did get raised [in the judging room], we did really want to choose a title that reflected the things that we're all grappling with, right now.
“But that wasn't the driving central discussion around this book - it was more about what the book was doing [artistically] and did it succeed on its own terms.”
Lynch said Prophet Song was "an attempt at radical empathy" with people experiencing political repression, saying: "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."
Born in Limerick, 46-year-old Lynch is only the fifth Irish writer to win the Booker Prize in its 54 year history, though writers from the country are generally well represented on the longlists and shortlists - and this year was no exception, with four of the thirteen longlisted authors hailing from Ireland.
Alongside Lynch, they were Elaine Feeney for How to Build a Boat, Paul Murray with The Bee Sting and Sebastian Barry with Old God's Time.
“This is a very strong generation of Irish writers,” said Edugyan. “Why that is, I don’t know - but perhaps, you know, there's a real celebration of literature in Ireland, in terms of the visibility of its contemporary writers.”
The judges deliberated for six hours before finally settling on Prophet Song. Edugyan said: “it really wasn't clear to any of us which book would take the prize in the end - and it wasn't a unanimous decision… but we're all very, very pleased and happy with this choice.”
