"The World is Ending right now in Gaza and Ukraine," says 2023 Booker Winner Paul Lynch at the JLF 2024

Discover profound insights into writing, failure, politics, and empathy by 2023 Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch at JLF 2024.

on Feb 02, 2024

"The World is Ending right now in Gaza and Ukraine," says 2023 Booker Winner Paul Lynch at the JLF 2024 | Frontlist

The author addresses the unsteady beginnings of his award-winning Prophet Song, how fiction may generate empathy, and why politics can damage a novelist.

Writing is primarily about failure, says to Paul Lynch, whose softly dystopic novel Prophet Song received the 2023 Booker Prize. quoting playwright Samuel Beckett ("Try again. Fail. Fail better"), he began day one of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024 by discussing how an abandoned novel followed this successful one, and why that isn't a terrible thing.

"I'd spent six months working on the incorrect novel. Then about 3 p.m. on a Friday, I realised I needed to stop.

I had a feeling something better was in store for me. As an artist, you spend your life leaning into your subconscious and accepting whatever comes through, unpacking it into something metaphorically compressed. So I showed up on Monday and completed the first page. Even though I didn't know what the book was about at the time, the significance was contained in those first phrases," he explained.

When writing the book, he discovered that "the Christian tradition's imagination of the world ending in a single apocalyptic event" was very simplistic, so he steered the narrative into something quieter. "Believing that the world will end in your lifetime is a sign of vanity. It finishes differently for each community. It is currently concluding in Gaza and Ukraine. The challenge was how to express the full significance of such events to a reader. We've all grown up with the spectacle of contemporary news. It can't get past our self-defenses anymore. "I wanted to write fiction that works against the spectacle," he explained.

He objected to Prophet Song being branded a political novel, stating, "When a writer goes down to write a political novel, they very often know the answers to the issues. They want to prove something is true. This tends to weaken serious fiction. Stendhal stated, "The political is a noose around great literature and drowns it in less than 15 minutes." In fiction, the questions prove to be more interesting than the answers.

When you look at the world politically, you have an agenda and know what the problem is and how to solve it. Great art is about sadness, not resentment. Grief is about what we don't know or understand.

On accessing a "higher" awareness when writing, he cited filmmaker Ingmar Bergman ("Intuition is the spear you throw in the darkness, intellect is the army you send to get it"), adding, "For me, meditation is an act of clearing, of turning down the volume on all the voices in my life." When you do this on a regular basis and mix it with an artistic practice, you will discover that you have more capacity than you realise.

I was astounded when I discovered my voice—the individuality that imprints itself on the page. I inquired, "Who is this other self coming through who is older and wiser than me?"