Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch: ‘The riots are a wake-up call for Ireland’

Novelist who wrote ‘Prophet Song’ a dystopian Ireland of far-right extremism discusses life imitating art in recent days

Irish Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch 'astonished' by Dublin disturbances

Claire Allfree
© Telegraph.co.uk

Paul Lynch turns up to our interview in a black dinner jacket that looks just like the one he was wearing 12 hours earlier when his novel Prophet Song won this year’s Booker Prize at a ceremony in London. Does this mean he hasn’t yet been to bed?

“I’ve had a few hours sleep, but I only took one jacket with me on the flight from Dublin,” he says with rumpled charm. “I feel I’m living in some sort of counterfactual moment, to be honest. Just like the characters in my book, I’m finding the real a bit hard to process.”