Irish writer Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning fifth novel is a timely and urgent book described as powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real, capturing the social and political anxieties of our time. The book is set in a dystopian Dublin in the grips of totalitarianism. Some of the themes of "Prophet Song" are eerily similar to the riots that broke out in Dublin last week. "Prophet Song" also echoes the violence in Palestine, Ukraine and Syria, and the experience of all those who flee from war-torn countries. The author speaks to FRANCE 24's culture editor Eve Jackson about winning the most prestigious literature prize in the English-speaking world, writing the Irish offspring of "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" – and what he's spending his prize money on.
Paul Lynch is an internationally acclaimed Irish novelist who has published five novels, winning several awards in the process. Before "Prophet Song", Lynch wrote "Beyond the Sea", "Grace", "The Black Snow" and "Red Sky in Morning".
His third novel "Grace" won the 2018 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the 2020 Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award. His second novel, "The Black Snow", won France's bookseller prize, Prix Libr'à Nous, for Best Foreign Novel.
