Paul Lynch is at the top of his game. The prestigious British literary prize Booker Prize, with a reward of 50,000 books (around 57,000 euros), was awarded to this Irish author for his dystopian novel Prophet Song during a ceremony Sunday evening in London.
The novelist, who was selected for the first time, was rewarded for his fifth novel, a dark and distressing story of the life of a mother in an Ireland which is falling into tyranny. “This book was not easy to write. Part of me thought I was going to jeopardize my career by writing it – but I still had to go through with it,” he said after his victory, expressing his “tremendous pleasure in bringing home the Booker in Ireland “.
A novel written during confinement
The Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, which rewards works of fiction in English, has contributed to the success of writers like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy. All the novelists selected for this edition – two Americans, a Canadian, two Irish and a Kenyan – were part of the final selection for the first time.
Paul Lynch partly wrote Prophet Song, a novel with a claustrophobic atmosphere, with blocks of text running over entire pages, during the confinements of the Covid-19 pandemic. This writer born in Limerick in 1977 and who lives in Dublin had notably already written the remarks Beyond The Sea And Grace.
A total of 158 books published in the United Kingdom or Ireland between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023 were submitted to the Booker Prize Foundation, and 13 of them were selected in a first round. Other shortlisted novels included Kenyan writer Chetna Maroo’s moving debut Western Lanethe story of a teenage squash enthusiast who loses herself in the sport while she is grieving.
Family stories
The tragicomic saga The Bee Sting by Irishman Paul Murray – the only one who had already been selected in the first round of the Booker Prize in 2010 – studies the influence of destiny in the economic and existential difficulties encountered by a family in rural Ireland. If I Survive You by American writer Jonathan Escoffery also tells the story of a family, Jamaican this time, who leaves Kingston in disaster and must rebuild their lives in Miami in the 1970s.
The work of the second American in the running Paul Harding, This Other Eden, is inspired by historical events and relates the life of marginalized people on Apple Island, an enclave off the American coast, under the suspicious eye and increasing constraint of the authorities. Finally, the disturbing Study for Obedienceby Canadian Sarah Bernstein, is a questioning of power and guilt, around the story of a young woman who leaves her birthplace to take care of her brother, and triggers disturbing events.