The Booker Prize is one of Britain's most prestigious awards for fiction and Paul Lynch will receive around €50,000 for winning.
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00:00 Irish author Paul Lynch has been awarded the prestigious 2023 Booker Prize for his novel
00:06 Prophet Song, a dystopian fiction about Ireland descending into tyranny. The 46-year-old wrote
00:13 the book during COVID-19 lockdowns and has described it as an attempt at radical empathy,
00:18 aimed at plunging readers into the experience of living in a collapsed society.
00:22 I specifically didn't articulate the politics because then the book would have been about the
00:28 politics and I wanted this book to be about the family. I wanted to take the Iliad and turn it
00:37 inside out and when you do that all the politics and all the heroics and everything that's
00:42 foregrounded disappears. What are you left with? You're left with Elishtag and her family.
00:46 Lynch is just the fifth Irish author to win the prize,
00:51 which has propelled to fame countless household names including Margaret Atwood.
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