In Pictures: Booker Prize-winner Paul Lynch in Cork for World Book Fest
Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch during the Cork World Book Festival at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork. Picture: David Creedon
An event with Booker Prize-winning author Paul Lynch was among the highlights of Cork World Book Fest, which wrapped up its 20th year over the weekend.
Lynch, whose fifth novel Prophet Song won the top literary award, was in conversation with Irish Examiner book reviewer Alannah Hopkin at the Triskel on Friday night. The author spoke about his writing process, his life-changing win, and how he interprets the end of the world in his writing.
“There is life before the Booker and there is life after,” he told the audience. “To put it simply, 90% of fiction writers will admit to wanting to win the Booker Prize, and the other 10% are lying. The reason everyone wants to win it is it’s the biggest game in town and you know that it is going to change your life, it’s going to change your readership, your sales, and your languages. Lots of marvellous things happen.”
He started writing Prophet Song before the pandemic and said he drew influences in his writing style from “the masters” — ancient storytellers like Virgil and Homer, who “hold the reader’s hand so they don’t fall in too.” He said he is “meticulous” and takes “extreme ownership” of his writing at a sentence level.
Prophet Song focuses on the struggles of one family in an alternate Ireland which is under a totalitarian regime. Lynch told the Triskel event that he believes the ‘end of the world’ happens over and over and is very localised.
He said one of his characters realises “this idea of biblical end days, of a sudden apocalypse is actually a myth. The end of the world has actually been occurring again and again and again and again.
“The end of the world is always a local event: it comes to your city, it comes to your town, and it knocks on your door. It’s the end of the world for you and your family. To everybody else, it’s just an event on the news that we watch while we eat our dinner.”
During the festival, authors such as Elaine Feeney, Mike McCormack, Eimear Ryan, Ronan Hession and Danielle McLoughlin spoke at various events across Cork City, while several writing workshops took place as well. The annual Book Market returned to Grand Parade on Saturday last while POP at Elizabeth Fort saw pop-up poetry readings, nature-inspired stories and crafts, a pop-up book fair and more on the final day of the festival.
