Paul Lynch: ‘When you win the Booker, you are told you won’t write for a year’

Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. Born in 1977, he grew up in Malin Head, the most northerly point on the Irish coast. His latest novel, Prophet Song, depicts a nightmarish vision of Ireland sliding into an authoritarian regime. Written in long, poetic sentences – without speech marks and few paragraph breaks – the novel pulls the reader into the claustrophobic world of a city under siege. Described by Lit Hub as a “300-page panic-attack”, Prophet Song, just published in paperback, won the Booker prize last year. Lynch has been compared to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner.

How has it been since you won the Booker?
I no longer measure time in weeks and months. I measure it by interviews. At Christmas, I’d passed the 100 mark. I’m at about 170 now. It still seems improbable, miraculous even, that the Booker prize came my way, though my eight-year-old daughter is unimpressed. She announced recently: “I am sick and tired of people stopping you on the street and saying ‘congratulations’.” The disdain with which she said that word would strip the skin.

One year ago to the day that you discovered you were on the Booker shortlist, you were on the operating table, having been diagnosed with cancer. Your son was born in 2018 and your marriage recently ended. How would you describe the past few years for you?
There is a photo of me taken seconds after winning the Booker. My editor, Juliet Mabey, puts her arms around me while my agent Simon Trewin leaps to his feet applauding. But I have my hands to my face. That is the photo of a man who can no longer process reality, who was met with a cancer diagnosis and major surgery 15 months prior and who saw his marriage end unexpectedly while in recovery. Ten seconds after that photo was taken, I was on my feet meeting the moment. I have been fortunate to get preventive immunotherapy and have been told the illness is very unlikely to recur. I cannot tell you how happy I am to be getting on with the rest of my life.

For many months you were working on ‘the wrong novel’. How did you change to get on track with the right one?
I was writing the wrong novel for about six months, just drilling through granite and getting nowhere. And then one Friday afternoon I thought: “This isn’t a novel, I’m done.” The following Monday I returned calmly to my desk with no idea what to do. I created a new document and waited. And then the opening page of Prophet Song arrived and I knew it had the juice, that ineffable substance you hope to find in your writing. In life, I am big proponent of the swerve. If Satan, when being cast out of heaven, had swerved, where might he have landed? I love that idea. We should all swerve now and again.

Reading the novel today, it is impossible not to be reminded of the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict. But you started writing in the autumn of 2018.
I was definitely trying to see into the modern chaos writing this book, though I was hardly surprised when I saw Mariupol being levelled or Gaza pounded to dust. I’ve been told I’ve written a zeitgeist novel, but to me this is a novel about what has been, what continues to be and what will always be. There is a wretchedness built into the human condition. There is no biblical end-of-days. We destroy the world again and again and again and you watch it on the news.

There were four Irish writers on the Booker longlist last year. While Irish fiction is always in a class of its own, it seems to be dominating at the moment. Why?
Ireland is in the midst of a social revolution and it’s having a profound impact on our art. Where once we lived in the shadow of the cross, we are now cosmopolitan Europeans creating a post-Catholic society, exploring and re-identifying what it means to be Irish in a globalised world. Our art has exploded with ferocious energy to meet this moment. Prophet Song seems to me a global novel, but it is indisputably Irish.

Were you a good student?
When I was 12, a teacher pounded me with his fists over a maths problem and that did it for me with school. In fourth year at secondary school, my English teacher kicked me out of honours English. We did not get on and I thought he was a fool. I sat in pass English for a few weeks and then found myself reinstated. My mother told me years later that some teachers were aghast, and along with my parents, went to the headmaster. How lucky I am for that. The writers that I devoured over the next two years – Hardy, Eliot, Shakespeare, Manley Hopkins – went into my DNA and made me what I am.

Are you back in your writing shed yet?
I am tinkering with something on the days when I don’t have interviews or travel, but in truth, I have so little bandwidth. When you win the Booker, you are told you won’t write for a year. I’ve met a few recent winners on the road who have each confided that it may take much longer than that. The impact on one’s psyche of winning a prize of this scale is not to be underestimated.

What do you do when you aren’t writing?
I spend a weird amount of time in supermarkets. I cook a lot and tend to make most meals from scratch. There really should be a limit to how many times a week one is allowed to enter Lidl. When I have downtime, or don’t have the kids, I play jazz LPs, watch classic cinema, read and mooch about. I tend not to watch TV. That latest show you want to discuss on your favourite streamer? Sorry, but I mostly haven’t got a clue, though I am a fan of The Bear.

You have described your worldview as tragic. Do you feel there is any hope for us?
Dostoevsky wanted to know how much human being is in a human being. I consider that my project. All five of my books belong to the tragic worldview. In other words, they are unashamedly metaphysical and concerned with the inevitability of suffering and loss within our impermanent world. Such notions might sound quaint, but we would do well to reflect on them in our mindless modern moment. The Oedipus plays and King Lear endure for good reason.

Tell us a joke.
A woodpecker walks into a bar, sits down and says: “Excuse me, is the bartender here?”

• Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is published by Oneworld (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply