Irish author Paul Lynch has won the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song was a fiction.
The Booker Prize selection committee noted that this is a soul-stirring novel about a woman’s struggle to protect her family in an Ireland torn apart by dictatorship and war.
Paul Lynch was awarded the Booker Prize along with a prize money of 50,000 pounds (about Rs 52 lakh in Indian currency) at a ceremony in London on Sunday.
Paul Lynch received the trophy from last year’s Booker Prize laureate Shegan Karunathilak.
From a total of 163 novels, 6 novels were selected for the final round. From these novels, Paul Lynch’s novel has been selected for the award. This is his 5th novel.
As of 2018, Paul Lynch has mentioned that it took him 4 years to write the novel.
Writer, avid reader, and critic Saravanan Manikavasakam says about this novel in his Facebook post:
“Paul Lynch is a man who takes complex material into the novel. This is the fifth novel of his which has won many awards and has written five novels so far.
Sometimes I don’t remember what I read before until I pick up a novel I read ten or twenty years ago and start reading it again. Some novels are known after reading fifty or sixty pages. But novels like Prophet Song are not easily forgotten. I will remember for a long time that I was shocked after reading.
“History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”. This is a line from the novel. Eelam brothers will know the strength of this line better than us living in a safe environment. In Ireland, fascism begins to grip everyone with its octopus hands. The whereabouts of the union leader’s husband, who was taken for questioning, remain unknown for months.
A seventeen-year-old son runs away from home and joins the militia to resist fascism. The wife’s life begins with the fear of being killed at any time, with three children, including a fourteen-year-old girl, without access to basic needs like food and electricity. Paul was inspired by writers like Melville, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, and Faulkner. By the age of ten, he had read all eighty-five books in the Hardy Boys series.
A person who is reading continuously. He has said in an interview that his son was born when he started writing this novel and he learned to ride a bicycle while finishing it. Before this, he tried to write this novel for six months and gave up because the copy did not turn out well.
All dystopian novels are difficult to read. Paul continues to increase the pressure without letting up. The novel covers the beginnings of fascism and its culmination. A novel that can be applied to any country except the name Ireland. This is one of the top ten novels I read this year.”
