Paul Lynch

Paul Lynch is an Irish novelist born in County Limerick in 1977. He studied film and communications at University College Dublin and has worked as a journalist and film critic. His debut novel Red Sky in Morning (2013) announced a major new voice in Irish fiction with its bold, biblical-inflected prose style. His subsequent novels include The Black Snow (2014), Grace (2017), Beyond the Sea (2019), and Prophet Song (2023). Prophet Song is a dystopian novel set in a near-future Ireland that has slipped into authoritarianism, following a woman as the society around her collapses and her family is destroyed by the new regime. The novel won the Booker Prize in 2023—making Lynch the first Irishman to win the prize since Roddy Doyle in 1993—as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2024. It was praised for its relentless prose, its urgent political vision, and its devastating emotional power. Lynch's prose style—syntactically unconventional, densely patterned, deeply literary—is considered one of the most distinctive in contemporary Irish fiction. He lives in Dublin.