“I miss my solitude,” last year’s Booker prize winner Paul Lynch told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.
“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.
“Something enormous comes your way, and you have to go with it. And I’ve gone with it, and I’ve done 200 interviews. It’s hard to process that, and I do worry, who will I be after this? When I come back to reality, when my feet touch the ground, what kind of writer am I going to be?
Lynch won the 2023 Booker prize for Prophet Song, set in an imagined Ireland that is descending into tyranny, praised for capturing “the social and political anxieties of our current moment”.
The day after winning, he did 23 interviews, with two 10-minute breaks. “I’m a meditator, and I said, ‘I need to meditate, so let me go into a room,’ and I meditate for 10 minutes and they literally grabbed me by the collar and yanked me back out.” The Booker prize staff told him he had appeared in 3,000 pieces of media around the world that day.
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After the media “tornado” is over, he ultimately believes he will be the “same writer”, because his “authentic self” takes over when he is writing. “When I seize upon an idea, all I’m interested in is getting to the end line of truth, and I hope that’s where I go next,” he said.
Lynch’s win in November came days after the Dublin riots. At the time, he thought “this isn’t the book coming true”. But “at the same time, it is the start of a certain energy that I’ve been thinking a lot about”.
It is a “very dangerous thing to presume” that liberal democracy is going to remain. “Civilisation is such a thin veneer, and it’s so fragile.”
He said that while Prophet Song “can be read as a very political novel”, he is not a political novelist. “That is something that has arrived almost by accident. What I’m seeking is human truth.”
Lynch also said that he has been re-reading Herzog by Saul Bellow, a writer “who has been banished. The problem with banished writers, the great dead white males, is that great writing still sits there, and it calls you back”.