Paul Lynch: Prophet Song

Irish novelist and winner of the 2023 Booker Prize Paul Lynch join us to talk about his winning novel, Prophet Song, a deeply moving exploration of what happened to ordinary people caught up in terrible events. 

The novel is set in an imagined Ireland teetering on the verge of collapse and controlled by a government descending into tyranny. Scientist Eilish Stack finds herself caught in a collapsing society after her husband, a trade union leader, mysteriously disappears. She faces some terrible choices of what or who she is prepared to sacrifice to save herself and her family.

Paul Lynch is the prize-winning author of the novels 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. He has been shortlisted for many international prizes, including France’s Prix Jean Monnet for European Literature, Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize), Prix Littérature Monde and the Walter Scott Prize. He was born in Limerick in 1977, grew up in Donegal and lives in Dublin.

James Conor Patterson is a poet from Newry, Co. Down. His debut collection bandit country (Picador) received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019 and was nominated for the TS Eliot Prize, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize in 2023. He edited the anthology The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border, published by New Island Books in 2021, and his writing has been featured in Granta, The Guardian, The Irish Times, New Statesman and The Stinging Fly, among others.