A look into a country flirting with totalitarianism? That’s not a documentary; it’s the subject of Prophet Song, Paul Lynch’s latest, and now award-winning, novel. The Irish writer won the 2023 Booker Prize in Fiction for his dystopian effort on November 26 at a ceremony in London. Set in a near-future Ireland, the story depicts a country teetering on the edge of authoritarian rule and later slipping into a civil war that leaves families with no choice but to flee. At a press conference ahead of the announcement, novelist and chair of this year’s judging panel Esi Edugyan said the novel is “a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave” and “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment,” per the New York Times. The panel debated the decision to award Prophet Song for six hours. Still, they weren’t unanimous in their choice to honor a book that recasts middle-class, white Europeans as refugees forced to make a dangerous sea crossing. “Prophet Song is partly an attempt at radical empathy,” Lynch said in an interview with the Booker Prize Foundation in August. “I wanted to deepen the reader’s immersion to such a degree that by the end of the book, they would not just know, but feel this problem for themselves.” Shouldn’t need a novel to do that today, but I digress.
