“In the UK they closed down 800 libraries in the past decade. In Ireland, we open libraries, we fund writers and give them bursaries. Writers are thriving now, and Ireland has become a post-Catholic culture. We are very progressive.”
For someone who has conjured up a dark vision of Irish society sliding into authoritarianism, he is surprisingly light and upbeat in person.
Paul Lynch celebrates his novel Prophet Song winning the Booker Prize last November.Credit: Kate Green/Getty Images
As we chat over chips in a yellow-tiled Aussie pub, he speaks breathlessly, like the way he writes. Prophet Song deploys run-on sentences without paragraph breaks, “pulling off feats of language that are stunning to witness,” the Booker judges said after his win.
Growing up a bookworm of a boy in Donegal in Ireland’s far north, Lynch said his parents - his mother an English teacher, his father in the coast guard - arranged for him to get a job at a secondhand bookstore at 11, to keep him in books. As a difficult teen, he was kicked out of his honours English class, until his teachers banded together to convince the principal to reinstate him.
“How lucky I am for that. Because that reading age at 16, 17, 18 imprints you. I remember sitting on a bed weeping after reading [Thomas Hardy’s] The Mayor of Casterbridge, and I’d never felt that way before... that a book could cut you to the bone like that. I’ve been chasing that hit ever since.”
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At 19, he left university for journalism, working on the now-defunct Sunday Tribune as a sub-editor, then a film critic because he felt he was too introverted to be a reporter. For 15 years he’s been “eeking out a living” writing fiction, which is now compared to classics of the dystopian genre such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
But what the single father of two children aged 5 and 9 has been struck by in his post-win travels, is how readers - from Syria, to Palestine and Ukraine - tell him the slide into fascism depicted in his book, is occurring in real life.
“I’m not a political scientist, I’m just a guy in Ireland making shit up, yet somehow this story seems to speak to multiple political realities around the world.”
Lynch will appear at two events on Friday as part of the Sydney Writers Festival.
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