Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song wins the 2023 Booker Prize – but the judges picked the wrong Paul

Six books, three authors called Paul, one £50,000 prize. In the end, Paul Lynch has taken the spoils for his dystopian tale of a totalitarian Ireland – but it doesn’t feel like a winner that will stand the test of time, writes our chief book critic Martin Chilton

Booker Prize 2023 winner Paul Lynch with his novel, Prophet Song (David Parry)

With three Pauls on a shortlist of six names, there was a decent chance one would triumph with the 2023 Booker Prize. As it turns out, it is Paul Lynch who can claim the bragging rights and the £50,000 prize pot for his hauntingly claustrophobic tale Prophet Song, published by Oneworld. The novel, about an imagined near-future dystopian Ireland that is heading towards tyranny, is undoubtedly a powerful book, but it’s a winning choice that jars. Picking favourite books is highly subjective, of course, but for me the outstanding novel on the shortlist was by another Irishman called Paul – Paul Murray’s tragicomic multi-voice family drama: The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton).

Although chair of 2023 judges Esi Edugyan, who has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was at pains to point out that any of the six could easily have won, in truth it was unlikely to have ever been either of the two debuts: Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane (Picador) or Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You (4th Estate), neither of which were special enough to win. Canadian Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (Granta Books) was also an outsider, and it was hard to see Paul Harding’s excellent This Other Eden (Hutchinson Heinemann), about a community of outcasts facing ethnic cleansing, winning over enough of the judges to take the prize.

Edugyan conceded that the final choice, after Saturday’s six-hour meeting with fellow judges actor Adjoa Andoh, poet Mary Jean Chan, literature professor James Shapiro and writer and Peep Show star Robert Webb, “wasn’t unanimous”. I can understand why Lynch’s book would have its supporters. Lynch spent four years writing the story of teacher and trade unionist Larry Stack, a husband and father who is arrested and imprisoned by repressive government forces as Ireland slides into totalitarianism. Larry’s sudden detention by the newly formed secret police acts as the catalyst for wife Eilish’s realisation that “the state they live in has become a monster”.