Booker-winning author of the Prophet Song tells his Sharjah International Book Fair audience that stories remain one of the few ways to confront truth, preserve empathy, and hold on to hope

Lynch: “Intuition is the spear you throw into the dark. Intellect is the army you send to fetch it back”

Sharjah, November 9, 2025 

When Paul Lynch walked onto the stage at the Sharjah International Book Fair 2025, the room was charged with anticipation. The Irish author, whose novel Prophet Song won the 2023 Booker Prize, was there to talk about “Fiction, Freedom and Fear.” But what unfolded was a conversation about his writing process and the importance and relevance of storytelling in today’s digital age.

Talking about his award-winning book, which has been translated into 41 languages, Lynch explained that it imagines a Western democracy sliding quietly into totalitarianism through the eyes of one woman, Eilish Stack, who struggles to hold her family together as her husband is arrested and her world begins to collapse.

When asked how the Booker Prize accolade changed his life, he shared: “When you’re an unknown writer, you dream of the Booker Prize because you think it will give you the audience you deserve. But when it comes, it’s a Faustian pact. It takes you away from your solitude, from that still, small voice that made you a writer in the first place.”

He admitted that the glare of global attention had been disorienting. “Before the Booker Prize, I had peace. After it, I had interviews, translations, and noise. I’m only now finding my way back to silence.”

Lynch described his writing as a deeply intuitive process, one that begins in mystery and only later becomes rational. Quoting filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, he added: “Intuition is the spear you throw into the dark. Intellect is the army you send to fetch it back.”

Prophet Song, he said, was never meant as a political statement but as an exploration of human fragility. He shared: “Some think, why did I set it in the Western world, as opposed to war-torn areas. But the book is more about what happens anywhere when fear takes hold and the truth begins to bend.”

Throughout the discussion, Lynch returned to a theme that resonated deeply with the audience: literature’s moral duty. “Great art doesn’t tell us what to think,” he said. “It helps us sit with what we don’t know. It gives shape and form to our confusion, to our grief, to our longing for meaning.”

When the conversation turned to artificial intelligence, Lynch’s response was sharp and reflective. “AI might soon be able to write a decent crime novel,” he said. “But what it can’t do, not yet, is feel. It can’t capture that ineffable voice, the ache that comes from being human.”

The audience was also treated to a moving reading from the first chapter of Prophet Song, with his calm voice carrying the novel’s quiet terror through the room. The audience listened, spellbound, as ordinary family life was disrupted.

The Q&A session with the audience was equally emotional as the talk itself. A reader from Iran shared how Prophet Song helped her understand her mother’s refugee experience. Lynch said: “You write something in Dublin and it finds someone across the world who says, ‘That’s me.’ That’s the miracle of storytelling.”

Another reader asked how he writes about fear without letting it consume him. “When I’m writing, I live inside that darkness,” he admitted. “But when I leave the desk, I return to being a dad. It keeps me sane.”

As the session ended, the audience lined up to have their copies of the Prophet Song signed. In conclusion, Lynch said: “Our stories remind us who we are and that’s how we begin to find our way back. A writer’s role is to tell the truth about human beings. To hold up a mirror, so we can see ourselves clearly, even when it hurts.”

He would not reveal what he is working on next, only smiling and saying, “Talking about the next book is the fastest way to ruin it.”

-ENDS-