Paul Lynch

Lynch was born in Limerick, raised in County Donegal, and spent years as chief film critic of Dublin's Sunday Tribune before his debut, Red Sky in Morning (2013), announced a novelist of dark, weathered lyricism. Grace (2017), a famine-era odyssey through a starving Ireland, won Irish Novel of the Year.

Prophet Song (2023) grew, he has said, from the West's indifference to Syria's collapse and the refugee crisis: as an authoritarian government hardens, scientist Eilish Stack loses her trade-unionist husband to the new secret police and must decide, child by child, when a country stops being home. The prose runs without paragraph breaks: claustrophobia as form.

It won the Booker in 2023, and its warnings have only grown less hypothetical since.