Congratulations to Paul Lynch who has been named the winner of this year's Booker Prize for his fifth novel, Prophet Song. The Booker Prize is a £50,000 literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK. Paul Lynch is the fifth Irish author to win the prize.

Prophet Song is an exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a country – and an ordinary family – on the brink of catastrophe. 

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband. Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society – assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together.  

Esi Edugyan, Chair of judges, said of the winning work: ‘From that first knock at the door, Prophet Song forces us out of our complacency as we follow the terrifying plight of a woman seeking to protect her family in an Ireland descending into totalitarianism. We felt unsettled from the start, submerged in – and haunted by – the sustained claustrophobia of Lynch’s powerfully constructed world. He flinches from nothing, depicting the reality of state violence and displacement and offering no easy consolations ... This is a triumph of emotional storytelling.'

Winner Paul Lynch said of the novel: ‘I was trying to see into the modern chaos. The unrest in Western democracies. The problem of Syria – the implosion of an entire nation, the scale of its refugee crisis and the West’s indifference. Prophet Song  is partly an attempt at radical empathy.'

Lynch was shortlisted alongside Chetna Maroo (Western Lane), Paul Murray (The Bee Sting), Sarah Bernstein (Study for Obedience), Paul Harding (This Other Eden) and Jonathan Escoffery (If I Survive You).

Read more about The Booker Prize here.