LONDON, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Irish writer Paul Lynch won the 2023 Booker Prize on Sunday for his novel 'Prophet Song', the story of a family and a country on the brink of catastrophe as an imaginary Irish government veers towards tyranny.
Lynch, who was previously the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper, said he wanted readers to understand totalitarianism by heightening the dystopia with the intense realism of his writing.
He became the fifth Irish author to win the Booker Prize, after Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright, the organisers of the competition said.
The Northern Irish writer Anna Burns won in 2018.
'Prophet Song' is published in the UK by Oneworld which also won the prize in 2015 and 2016 with Marlon James’s 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' and Paul Beatty’s 'The Sellout.'
Persons:
Paul Lynch, Booker, Lynch, Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Yann Martel, Marlon James’s, Paul Beatty’s, William Schomberg, Giles Elgood
Organizations:
Sunday Tribune, Northern, Oneworld, Seven, Thomson
Locations:
Syria, Ireland, Irish, Northern Irish