"Prophet Song" wins 2023 Booker Prize

The 2023 Booker Prize has been won by Prophet Song, a novel by Irish writer Paul Lynch. The author received £50,000 and a trophy at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate, London, on 26 November.

The winning novel tells the story of a dystopian Ireland where a scientist and mother of four strives to keep her family together amid the government's rising tyranny and a collapsing society.

"Heralded in one review as 'a crucial book for our current times', Prophet Song captures some of the biggest social and political anxieties of our age, from the rise of political extremism to the global plight of refugees," the Booker Prize website states.

The author stated that the novel "is partly an attempt at radical empathy. To understand better, we must first experience the problem for ourselves. So I sought to deepen the dystopian by bringing to it a high degree of realism. 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."

"From that first knock at the door, Prophet Song forces us out of our complacency as we follow the terrifying plight of a woman seeking to protect her family in an Ireland descending into totalitarianism," said Esi Edugyan, chair of the judging panel, of the book. "We felt unsettled from the start, submerged in – and haunted by – the sustained claustrophobia of Lynch's powerfully constructed world. He flinches from nothing, depicting the reality of state violence and displacement and offering no easy consolations."

The Booker Prize judges deemed Prophet Song "a shocking, at times tender novel that is not soon forgotten. Propulsive and unsparing, it flinches away from nothing. This is an utterly brave performance by an author at the peak of his powers, and it is terribly moving."

Once known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), the Booker Prize is given every year to the best novel written in English, published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Lynch is the fifth Irish author to win the Booker Prize and he was one of four Irish writers to make this year's longlist.

Get Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, here.