The prestigious British literary prize Booker Prize has been awarded to Irish author Paul Lynch 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 see it through.”declared Paul Lynch after his victory, expressing his “tremendous pleasure to bring the Booker back to Ireland”.
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. The winner receives a reward of 50,000 pounds (around 57,000 euros) and the assurance of international success.
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 already written four novels, including the noted Beyond The Sea And Grace.
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. The finalist works of this edition brought to life “terrors, pleasures, joys and consolation” to the members of the jury, declared its president, the Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan. These novels “offer a full range of human experiences” and transport the reader “not only outside of reality, but also outside of the common language of daily life”she had described.
Chetna Maroo, Paul Murray, Jonathan Escoffery, Paul Harding and Sarah Bernstein in final selection
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 Lane, the story of a teenage squash enthusiast who loses herself in the sport while she is grieving. The tragicomic saga The Bee Sting by the 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 the 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 the Miami of 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. 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.
Last year, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, 47, won the Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. This darkly humorous murder story takes place in the 1990s in the capital of Sri Lanka, Colombo, after the civil war that ravaged the country.