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Paul Lynch is an Irish novelist. He has won numerous prestigious accolades including the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award (2018) for his novel Grace and the Booker Prize (2023) for his novel Prophet Song.
Wiki/Biography
Paul Lynch was born on Monday, 9 May 1977 (age 46 years; as of 2023) in Limerick, Ireland. His zodiac sign is Taurus. When he was an infant, his family moved to Donegal, where he spent his childhood in remote Malin Head. His mother taught him to read when he was four using flash cards from a cereal box.
He became a reader with a shortened version of King Solomon’s Mines (1885), a popular novel by the English Victorian adventure writer Sir H. Rider Haggard. At that time, Lynch was eight. In an interview, he described reading his first book and said,
I will never forget that first feeling of being overpowered by a great book. I used to read every night until two or three in the morning. I used to read books sneakily under the desk at school.”
A voracious reader as a kid, Lynch took up a job in the town’s only bookshop at 11 just so he could get free books. Recalling his days at the bookshop, in an interview, He said,
The pay was terrible. Two pounds for a Saturday, I think. I used to have to wash mugs in a hand basin in smelly toilets and drink tea with sour milk. I didn’t mind so much, though — I was devouring every book within sight.”
He enrolled in the University College Dublin (UCD) to learn English and philosophy, but he dropped out the college. In his twenties, he played in a rock band, performing on stages around Dublin. Later, he started living in Dublin with his family.
Physical Appearance
Height (approx.): 5′ 10″
Hair Colour: Brown
Eye Colour: Brown
Family
Parents & Siblings
Lynch’s father worked for the Irish Coast Guard, and his mother was an adult literacy teacher. Lynch is the middle child of three siblings.
Wife & Children
He was married to Sarah Lynch, but later they separated. He has two children, one of them is a girl.
Career
Paul Lynch spent his twenties trying to avoid being a writer as he was terrified of failure. Reading throughout his childhood and teenage had made his standards for fiction impossibly high. At the age of 30, he had an epiphany on a hillside while on holiday in Lipari in Sicily. It was at that moment that Lynch knew that he had to start writing. He rushed back to his hotel and wrote his first short story. It took him three years to write his first novel. He worked as a journalist, the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007 to 2011. He regularly wrote for The Sunday Times on film, before becoming a full-time novelist. In 2013, Lynch published his first book Red Sky in Morning, which earned him massive critical acclaimation United States and France.
It was the subject of a six-publisher auction in London. The book took its inspiration from a television documentary detailing the digging at Duffy’s Cut, a location near Philadelphia where, during the 1830s, Irish immigrants—primarily from Ulster—were found in a mass grave without any markings. These Irishmen died of Cholera. The novel explores subjects like migration, racism, and cruelty against Irish immigrants. The book was a finalist for France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) and was nominated for the Prix du Premier Roman (First Novel Prize). His second book, The Black Snow, was published in the UK and Ireland in 2014 and in the US in 2015.
The novel depicts the homecoming of an Irish migrant to his original community in County Donegal and the tragic events that unfold when a cowshed catches fire. In France, the book won the French Booksellers’ Award Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and the first Prix des Lecteurs Privat. It was also nominated for the Prix Femina and the Prix du Roman Fnac (Fnac Novel Prize). On 7 June 2017, Lynch’s third novel Grace was published in paperback by Oneworld.
The book is about a young girl trying to survive during the Irish Famine. It’s a story of her growing up and facing challenges. The Washington Post called Grace “a moving work of lyrical and at times hallucinatory beauty… that reads like a hybrid of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” In 2018, Paul Lynch received the €15,000 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2017 for Grace, presented during the inaugural evening of Listowel Writers’ Week in Kerry. The book was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2018, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in 2018, the Grand Prix de L’Héroïne in 2019, and Prix Jean-Monnet de Littérature Européenne in 2019. It was in June’s Irish Times Book Club selected title. In 2019, Lynch published his fourth novel, Beyond the Sea. The book narrates the haunting story of two men stranded at sea who push against their physical and mental limits to stay alive.
In 2023, Lynch gained international stardom when his fifth novel Prophet Song won the Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. The book was inspired by the Syrian war and refugee crisis. Set in Dublin, the novel tells the challenges faced by the Stack family, especially Eilish Stack, a mother of four who is working to protect her family as the Republic of Ireland descends into totalitarianism.
Themes and Style
All of Lynch’s deal with Irish history and all of his characters suffer. He gained popularity for his poetic, lyrical style, and exploration of complex themes.Growing up in Donegal, he felt like an outsider, which is deeply evident in his books. In an interview, talking about the same, he said,
I felt isolated as a child, I felt that I didn’t belong because I was told consistently by other kids that I was an outsider so I grew up with that sense of not belonging. And you’ll see that deeply in my books, a lot of my characters have that outsider mentality. If you’re a sensitive, intuitive male, which I am, then that presents challenges growing up.”
In an interview, Lynch revealed that Prophet Song’s origins came from the Syrian refugee crisis. In 2015, a two-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi made global headlines after his tiny body washed up on a beach in Turkey amid the European refugee crisis. The event led Lynch to start writing Prophet Song.
Awards
- 2016: Prix des Lecteurs Privat for his novel Grace
- 2016: Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel for his novel Grace
- 2018: The Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for his novel Grace
- 2020: Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors’ Literary Award for his novel Grace
- 2022: Prix Gens de Mer for his novel Beyond the Sea
- 2023: Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song
Paul Lynch after winning the Booker Prize (2023)
Facts/Trivia
- A music lover, Lynch has a huge collection of jazz records, and he has two metal-styled electric guitars.
- In an interview, Lynch revealed that he spent four years working on Prophet Song (2023). He started writing it just before his son was born, and by the time he finished, his son was able to ride a bike.
- At 45, he was diagnosed with cancer. He had a tumour in his kidney. He underwent surgery for it in 2023.