2023-11-27 00:13:32
The Irish writer Paul Lynch has received the British Booker Literature Prize 2023 for his novel “Prophet Song”. In it he tells the story of a family suffering under a tyrannical Irish government. With his fifth novel, the 46-year-old describes unrest in Western democracies and shows their indifference to catastrophes such as the implosion of Syria.
“From the first knock on the door, ‘Prophet Song’ forces us out of our complacency as we follow the terrible plight of a woman trying to protect her family in an Ireland sliding into totalitarianism,” said Esi Edugyan, Chair the Booker jury. The book is a “triumph of emotional storytelling, invigorating and courageous.”
Lynch, who was previously chief film critic for the Irish newspaper Sunday Tribune, said he wanted readers to understand totalitarianism by heightening the dystopia with the intense realism of his writing. “I wanted to deepen the reader’s immersion so that by the end of the book they themselves feel this problem,” Lynch said in a commentary published on the Booker Prize website.
Lynch is the fifth Irish author to win the prestigious Booker literary prize, joining Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright. The Northern Irishwoman Anna Burns won the award, which honors the best English-language novel every year, in 2018. The prize, worth 50,000 pounds (approx. 57,500 euros), was awarded for the first time in 1969. Prominent winners include Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Yann Martel.
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