Opinion Paul Lynch’s Booker win: A writer in search of radical empathy
Express View: Selection of ‘Prophet Song’ as the winner highlights the slow turn that the Booker Prize seems to be taking towards more political themes
Last year's winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, was a darkly comedic look at the three-decade-long civil war that had ravaged the country. 
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It begins with a knock on the door one morning. Dublin microbiologist Eilish Stack’s world is upended when reports of the state’s increasing totalitarianism manifest in her house in the form of the secret police. Their demand: To interrogate her trade unionist husband Larry.
As he disappears into the stranglehold of state machinery, and as Ireland breaks out in civil war, all Stack wants is to keep her family together. Days after a stabbing incident outside a school in north central Dublin led to one of the worst instances of anti-immigrant unrest in Ireland, Paul Lynch’s fifth novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize for Literature for its powerful, unsettling depiction of Stack’s slowly unravelling life in a country on the cusp of irreversible change.
In a year that saw a strong representation of Irish novelists in the award’s rolls — four of 13 authors in the longlist, of which two, Lynch and Paul Murray (for The Bee Sting), made it to the shortlist — Lynch had been the bookmaker’s favourite for the urgency of his theme. In its acknowledgement, the jury lauded Prophet Song for its ability to shake readers out of their “complacency” with its warning about “the precarity of democratic ideals and the ugly possibilities that lie beyond their desecration.”
Lynch has spoken of how the novel had been his way of interpreting political chaos around the world, especially the immigrant crisis and the West’s apathy towards it. Prophet Song, he said, was an attempt at “radical empathy”. The book’s selection as the winner also highlights the slow turn that the Booker Prize seems to be taking towards more political themes.
Last year’s winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, was a darkly comedic look at the three-decade-long civil war that had ravaged the country. In Lynch’s novel, a character urges Stack to leave her beleaguered country and escape.
“History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave,” she says. Lynch shows how history can also be written when people hang in there and push back in entirely unexpected ways.
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