Paul Lynch

Some Lesser Known Facts About Paul Lynch

• Paul Lynch is a popular Irish author who has received several prestigious honours like the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award in 2018 for his novel Grace and the Booker Prize in 2023 for his novel Prophet Song.

• Lynch was an infant when his family relocated to Donegal, where he spent his childhood in remote Malin Head. His mother would teach him to read using flashcards from a cereal box when he was four.

• At the age of eight, Lynch developed his reading habit with a shortened version of King Solomon’s Mines (1885), a well-known novel by the English Victorian adventure writer Sir H. Rider Haggard. He described reading his first book in an interview 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.”

• Lynch loved reading a lot when he was young. At the age of 11, he started working at the town’s only bookshop just to get free books. In an interview, he recalled his days at the bookshop and 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.”

• During his twenties, he was part of rock bands, playing on stages across Dublin.

• Eventually, he moved to Dublin with his family.

• In his twenties, Paul Lynch avoided becoming a writer due to a fear of failure, influenced by his high standards for fiction developed during his childhood and teenage years.

• At the age of 30, while vacationing in Lipari, Sicily, he had a revelation on a hillside that compelled him to start writing. Rushing back to his hotel, he penned his first short story. It took him three years to complete his debut novel.

• Initially working as a journalist, he served as the chief film critic for Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007 to 2011 and contributed regularly to The Sunday Times on film before becoming a full-time novelist.

• In 2013, Lynch published his first book, Red Sky in Morning, receiving widespread critical acclaim in the United States and France. The inspiration for the book came from a TV documentary about the digging up of unmarked graves at Duffy’s Cut near Philadelphia, where Irish immigrants from Ulster, who had died of Cholera in the 1830s, were buried. The novel explores themes like migration, racism, and the hardships faced by Irish immigrants. The book was recognised as a finalist for France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) and received a nomination for the Prix du Premier Roman (First Novel Prize).

• Lynch’s second book, The Black Snow, was released in the UK and Ireland in 2014 and in the US in 2015. The book narrates the story of the return of an Irish migrant to his native community in County Donegal and the tragic events that follow 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, Paul Lynch’s third book, Grace, was released in paperback by Oneworld. The novel revolves around a young girl’s struggle for survival during the Irish Famine. In 2018, Paul Lynch was honoured with the €15,000 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2017 for Grace, presented at the inaugural evening of Listowel Writers’ Week in Kerry. The book earned nominations 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 also a selected title in June’s Irish Times Book Club.
  

• In 2019, Lynch released his fourth novel, Beyond the Sea, which recounts the haunting tale of two men stranded at sea, pushing against their physical and mental limits to survive.
  

• In 2023, Paul Lynch achieved global acclaim when his fifth book, Prophet Song, won the Booker Prize, one of the most esteemed literary honours worldwide. Drawing inspiration from the Syrian war and refugee crisis, the novel unfolds in Dublin and depicts the hardships faced by the Stack family, particularly Eilish Stack, a mother of four who works hard to protect her family as the Republic of Ireland descends into totalitarianism.

• During an interview, Lynch shared that the inspiration for Prophet Song originated from the Syrian refugee crisis. In 2015, the tragic incident of a two-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi gaining global attention after his lifeless body washed ashore on a Turkish beach amid the European refugee crisis led Lynch to begin authoring Prophet Song.

• In an interview, Lynch disclosed that he dedicated four years to writing Prophet Song. He initiated the writing process shortly before the birth of his son, and by the time he completed the novel, his son had begun riding a bike.

• Lynch’s works centre around Irish history, with each of his characters facing hardship. He is well known for his poetic, lyrical style, and exploration of complex themes. His sense of being an outsider during his upbringing in Donegal is reflected in his novels. In an interview, Lynch talked about the same and 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.”

• Apart from being passionate about writing, Lynch is also a music lover. He has a huge collection of jazz records, and he plays the metal-styled electric guitar.

• At 45, he was diagnosed with cancer. He had a tumour in his kidney for which he underwent surgery in 2023.