Irish author Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker Prize for his dystopian novel Prophet Song.
The £50,000 ($84,882 Cdn) prize annually recognizes the best original novel written in the English language and published in the U.K.
Prophet Song is a terrifying imagining of an Ireland that is falling apart. When mother and scientist Eilish Stack receives a house call from two secret police officers arriving to interrogate her trade unionist husband, she must decide how far she’s willing to go to save her loved ones.
Paul Lynch’s harrowing and dystopian Prophet Song vividly renders a mother’s determination to protect her family as Ireland’s liberal democracy slides inexorably and terrifyingly into totalitarianism. Readers will find it timely and unforgettable. It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.
“Well, there goes my hard-won anonymity,” said Lynch in his acceptance speech. “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.”
“My writing has saved me. I believe that literary style should be a way of knowing how the world has been and is unfolding. Sentences should press into the unknown moment, into the most obscure hidden aspects of life, that which is barely known but asking to be revealed.”
Since 2013, authors from any nationality have been eligible for the prize. No Canadians were recognized for the 2022 prize, but Canadian authors Mary Lawson and Rechel Cusk made the Booker Prize longlist in 2021.
Margaret Atwood shared the 2019 prize with British novelist Bernardine Evaristo. Atwood was recognized for her novel The Testaments, and Evaristo for her novel Girl, Woman, Other. They split the prize money evenly.
Two other Canadians have won the prize since its inception in 1969: Micheal Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient and Yann Martel in 2002 for Life of Pi.
