“I used to be a writer,” Paul Lynch jokingly comments when he is asked how winning the Booker Prize has changed his life. On the first evening of Festivaletteratura in Mantova, Italy, a crowd gathered in a church to listen to Lynch. He won the Booker Prize in 2023 for his novel Prophet Song, in which a radical right-wing party has come to power in Ireland. The party visits everyone who is not considered loyal to the regime. One evening, microbiologist and mother-of-four Eilish finds them on her doorstep looking for her husband. He does not return home and Eilish is left behind to care for their four children and her aging father. As the world unravels around her, Eilish continues to fight for her family.

“Eilish is a truly complex character,” Lynch says. This complexity is made up of the squeeze we find ourselves in, being caught up in our own lives. We do not look around to see the world falling apart. In the age of the spectacle, according to Lynch, we watch other people’s stories on the news without seeing the complexity of their lives behind the stories. Fiction can go around that and take you into the full complexity of life.

Lynch wrote Prophet Song before the current conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, but he believes the novel speaks perfectly to these situations. Lynch insists that, for these people, the world is already ending. The world is continuously ending, and it will continue to do so throughout time. In that, Prophet Song is a conversation between present, past, and future all at once.