#the booker prize 2023

[thefrsers]

Caitriona Balfe | The Booker Prize Awards 2023

[t-jfh]

Prophet Song a novel by Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker Prize.

Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song

(Photo: Joel Saget)

Booker Prize winner Prophet Song is a prophetic masterpiece

Paul Lynch’s novel is a terrifying story about the ascent of modern-day fascism.

Book review by Ron Charles

The Washington Post - November 27, 2023

Shared from Apple News

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Paul Lynch, the author of Prophet Song, won the Booker Prize on Sunday.

(Photo: David Cliff/EPA, via Shutterstock)

Paul Lynch Wins Booker Prize for Prophet Song

Prophet Song imagines a near-future Ireland descending into totalitarianism, then a civil war that leads to families’ fleeing the country.

Esi Edugyan, the chair of this year’s Booker Prize judging panel, said that Prophet Song resonated with contemporary crises including the Israel-Hamas war, but that the novel had won solely on its literary merits. “This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave,” Edugyan said in a news conference. While the judges were not unanimous in their decision, Edugyan said Prophet Song was a worthy winner that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment.”

Book review by Alex Marshall

The New York Times - November 26, 2023

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The author Paul Lynch, who won the 2023 Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song.

(Photo: Tolga Akmen/EPA, via Shutterstock)

Life Descends Into Chaos in This Year's Booker Prize Winner

Prophet Song, a novel by Paul Lynch, is set in Dublin during a political crisis.

Prophet Song promises some degree of timeliness, and comes at a moment when the fear it addresses is daily in the news: that the social contract is about to break, that what we think of as ordinary life is about to be transformed into a constant existential struggle, which will be played out not in a state of nature but in something arguably worse, at the fault line between opposing ideologies.

Book review by Benjamin Markovits

The New York Times - December 1, 2023

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Writer Paul Lynch evokes dark visions of a fascist dystopia, in his novel Prophet Song.

(Photo: Gary Doak/Alamy)

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch review – Ireland under fascism

This Booker Prize-winning dystopia with shades of Cormac McCarthy is nightmarish yet horribly convincing.

The Irish offspring of The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song is as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across: powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real. From its opening pages it exerts a grim kind of grip; even when approached cautiously and read in short bursts it somehow lingers, its world leaking out from its pages like black ink into clear water.

Book review by Melissa Harrison

The Guardian - 31 August 2023

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Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song, set in an imagined Dublin descending into far-right tyranny, wins the 2023 Booker Prize.

‘Soul-shattering’ Prophet Song by Paul Lynch wins 2023 Booker prize

Irish author Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker prize for his fifth novel Prophet Song, set in an imagined Ireland that is descending into tyranny. It was described as a “soul-shattering and true” novel that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment” by the judging chair, Esi Edugyan.

By Ella Creamer

The Guardian - 27 November 2023

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'I'm a state-of-the-soul writer' … Paul Lynch.

(Photo: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian)

Paul Lynch’s timely Booker winner is a novel written to jolt the reader awake

Prophet Song imagines an Ireland under fascist control, breaking through the it-couldn’t-happen-here complacency of western societies.

With Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, the judges have chosen perhaps the most timely and urgent book on the shortlist – a novel explicitly plugged into global strife and political tectonic forces. But it’s also the very intimate, elemental story of one woman’s love for her family, and her desperate attempts to hold on to the immediate world around her in the face of rising chaos.

By Justine Jordan

The Guardian - 27 November 2023

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Writer, Paul Lynch: 'I'm sort of finding out again who I am now.'

(Photo: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian)

‘This is a wake-up call’: Booker winner Paul Lynch on his novel about a fascist Ireland

The writer of Prophet Song, Paul Lynch, was on the operating table for cancer, then exactly a year later he found out his nightmarish vision had made the shortlist. He reveals why the words for Prophet Song came out with such urgency, there was no time for paragraph breaks.

‘The universal trickster has been at work on my life in all sorts of wild ways,” Irish novelist Paul Lynch tells me the morning after he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, which imagines Ireland taken over by a fascist regime. It has been a dramatic few years since he started writing the novel in 2018: his son had just been born; he had long Covid, which made writing an impossibility some days; he has had cancer and separated from his wife. And now he has landed the biggest prize in contemporary fiction. “There’s a general sense of unreality,” he says of winning. “I’ve stepped into my own ‘Sliding Doors’ counterfactual narrative.”

By Lisa Alladice

The Guardian - 28 November 2023

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[brian-in-finance]

Caitríona in conversation at the 2023 Booker Prize presentation

Caitríona’s conversation starts at 21:41

Video 📹 clip from YouTube (link above clip)

Remember… ever since I remember, my mum brought us to the library; that was our weekly thing. We went in and picked four or five books. I grew up in a very small village and it was just having this window into so many places in in the world. — Caitríona Balfe

Brian’s Post from Sunday

[resetme]

History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.

— Paul Lynch, Prophet Song.

[naberiie]

finished boulder by eva baltasar today and am a bit conflicted. i really related to the disgust the pov character, a queer woman, felt towards all things pregnancy and childbirth related. it was so genuinely refreshing to read the way the author wrote never couched that disgust or ever shamed her for it. the despair i felt while reading as the noose of her situation gradually closed in with no way out was an incredibly unique experience. and then it flipped on its head to ‘i didn’t love my child until i held it and now i want nothing more’. i recognize that it’s a subversion of a heteronormative trope, where it’s the father who feels increasingly alienated from and confused by his changing partner throughout a pregnancy but then he holds the baby and finally Gets It. i didn’t want her to get it. i wanted her to get out, with that same utterly refreshing lack of condemnation

[sisterrevisited]

I was giving myself up at last and entirely to my brother body and soul, occupying every corner of him, bending to his will, or in the absence of will, bending at the very least to the needs of his body, the needs of his soul, to have his life be the only duty of another, to be venerated. All his teachings, I felt, through childhood, through adolescence, to this day, had been leading to this point, my sublimation of myself in my brother, for my brother.

- Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

[dianessunflower]

Watch Caitríona Balfe read an extract from ‘Prophet Song’, a Booker Prize 2023-shortlisted novel written by Paul Lynch.

The story so far: Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

Discover the book: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booke...

Directed by Hannah Berry George for Mermade Films

[booksofdelight]

The 6 Books Shortlisted For the Booker Award 2023

Six books have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize for Fiction award. The winner of the award will win a £50,000. The winner will be announced on November 26 and a ceremony will be held at Old Billingsgate in London, England The Booker Prize of Fiction Shortlist These six books were chosen from 163 novels published in the U.K. or Ireland from October 1, 2022, to September 30, 2023. None…

[translatedlit]

Book 12 of 2023: Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (translated by Rosalind Harvey) turns out I just love reading books about the ambivalence of motherhood and this covered such an amazing range of emotions. I think this makes a perfect companion to the Involuntary Trilogy by Ariana Harwicz

[subtextures]

Prophet Song, quick take

I finished Prophet Song by Paul Lynch over the last couple of days for my book group (RFB). It is hard to put down, even when you want to look away. An intense, disturbing read. Great lit! Ireland turns toward fascism and civil war. The story follows Eilish and her family as she struggles to keep her family intact and survive. I was paranoid inside of the first 30 pages, and stayed that way to the end 275 pages later. I was always expecting the worst. So many echoes of our current political situations, as well as genocide around the world. I imagine it will stay with me for quiet a long while. Read it. Seriously.

[brian-in-finance]

PaulLynchWriter

Video 📹 from Instagram

Remember her congratulating Paul Lynch, 2023 Booker Prize winner?

Brian’s related posts 1 2 3 4

[thegirlwholovessynchronicity]

‘Mona sat in front of the dressing table mirror for long stretches of time. She developed a placid expression, which made her look older. When at last we returned to Western Lane, she seemed to commit herself to a new relationship with Pa and us. She began to manage everything in the house, but she sought Pa’s opinions on things and listened to what he said. She served me extra dal and rice and took less for herself. She asked me if I had changed out of my damp clothes after training, and she asked Khush about her homework. She was attentive to us, even kind. Sometimes we could feel the strain in her, the mental and physical burden of being something she was not.’

‘Western Lane’ by Chetna Maroo

[ohmysatan42]

Perks of working in a library- being able to get out the booker prize winner the moment it arrives. (Yeah it hasn't even sat on the shelves yet)

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Reading

Paul Lynch PROPHET SONG

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I don't know about you, but of my (many) favorite things about winter in the north is that when it's dark at 4:45 PM, you can totally justify reading at 5:00 PM rather than 6:00 or 7:00 or even 8:00 PM and not feel at all rushed for your 10:00 movie.

[semnebune]

Și scriitorii celebri dau rateuri, interviu cu câștigătorul Booker Prize 2023, ecranizări mai noi și mai vechi și alte noutăți din lumea literară

Nu toate cărțile mult așteptate se ridică la înălțimea așteptărilor, cărți despre Vladimir Putin oprite de la vânzare, ecranizări mai noi și mai vechi ale unor cărți, disponibile pe platformele de streaming, interviu cu scriitorul irlandez care a câștigat Booker Prize 2023 și o lansare de carte care va avea loc săptămâna aceasta – iată cele câteva noutăți din lumea literară care mi-au atras…