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

The writer 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.”

Before beginning the novel, Lynch had spent months writing “the wrong book”. Then, one Friday afternoon, he realised it was dead. The following Monday he sat in his shed at the bottom of his garden in Dublin, opened a new Word document and the first page of Prophet Song came to him almost as it appears in the novel. He describes it as “one of the miracles” of his writing life. “The entire meaning of what was to come in the book is encoded in those first few lines and yet I didn’t know what I was going to write.”