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Paul Lynch has deep Limerick roots.   His parents hail from Limerick. and the Lynch family continue to have strong ties to the Treaty City and County.  Born in Limerick on May 9^th 1977, Paul lived here for the first nine months of his life before his family moved to rural Donegal.  After his schooling and university studies, Paul worked as a film critic and senior sub-editor with The Sunday Tribune newspaper in Dublin.   

In 2013, Paul’s first novel Red Sky in the Morning was published.  It was selected as a book of the year by The Irish Times, The Toronto Star, the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post. NPR’s “All Things Considered” responded to his debut novel by declaring Lynch to be a “a lapidary young master.” 

His second novel The Black Snow was published in 2014.  Our Creative Writing programme here ��ɫ��Ƶ was established that year. Paul Lynch was an early supporter, was indeed among the very first novelists to visit a UL Creative Writing classroom, where he answered questions from our students with gentleness, wisdom and insight, and read from his remarkable novel. Nominated for numerous awards, it won, amongst others, the French Booksellers’ Prize, the Prix Libra Nous for Best Foreign Novel. Lynch’s writing was described by the late Alan Cheuse as being “…somewhere between that of […] Seamus Heaney and Cormac McCarthy.”  

Paul’s third novel, Grace, won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize. Beyond the Sea was chosen as a book of the year in the Irish Independent by Sebastian Barry, longtime friend and supporter of UL Creative Writing, who called the book "masterly". In 2021, it was published to wide acclaim in France where it won the 2022 Prix Gens de Mers. In 2024, Paul Lynch was by peer nomination and election made a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy honouring artists whose work is deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts.  

From a promising beginning, Paul Lynch has evolved into one of the great novelists of his generation. His sentences are composed with a radiance and power that defy easy explanation or quantification; they have about them a kind of an otherworldly lilt, as though they’ve been whispered through, in a tone at once hushed and strident, from some other place. His storytelling is confronting and fierce, unrelenting in its divination of the truths that underlie our complex, irrational dynamics, drilling deep into the layers of our humanity, striking always for the core. He reaches as close into the dark mass that lies there as any writer ever has. Paul Lynch’s novels are replete with moments that cause his readers to pause, to be still and silent so that they can experience fully the sublimity of his language, his prescience and wisdom, the wild brilliance of his imagination, the skill and grace of his storytelling.  

These breathtaking skills were lavishly on display in Prophet Song, his most recent novel’, shortlisted in March for the Dublin International Literary Award, the world’s largest literary prize for a single book. 

‘If you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts….If you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over, people accept it as true…. an old idea… but you’re watching it happen in your own time.’ 

This exchange between Eilish Stack and her father, early in Prophet Song, echoes ominously through Paul Lynch’s searing novel - just as it reverberates through the fractured political landscapes of the non-fiction world we are living in. With truly startling skill, Lynch’s narrative pulls us into the slow tightening of an authoritarian grip. The story is not one of collapse but of corrosion - how freedoms slip away, bit by bit, until the unthinkable has become the everyday. 

Prophet Song, winner of the Booker Prize in 2023, is unflinching in its depictions of this descent into tyranny. With quiet precision, Lynch captures the terror wielded by a state that no longer answers to its people. In an age of information overload—where the truth shifts, distorts, and disappears in a deluge, where narratives flicker and dissolve in the ceaseless churn—this novel insists that we stop, that we bear witness. It is a work that demands attention, brings a myriad of prevailing political dangers up close, challenges apathy and nurtures ways of seeing and being that the world needs now as urgently as ever it has. 

Paul Lynch is a young artist to have already achieved so much – and so much of solid worth - that we may speak, without the slightest risk of hyperbole, of a legacy that will last and will influence many younger and newer writers and become part of the consciousness of readers not yet born. There is, first, his fearlessness, his capacity to believe that the novel, the story, the brittle medium of language itself, can approach any subject no matter how unapproachable, how contentious, resistant or difficult. Then there is the deftness and vividness of his skills, and his courage in how he deploys them. The beauty of his writing, how it shimmers and resounds. Also, his resilience, the way he has kept going, eyes always on the horizon of his stories, his vision and his art. We are honoured to have him back with us today at the UL Creative Writing Festival, among readers and fellow writers and learners and teachers, in this community that must never lift its gaze from the truths of the world, and to confer on him this degree as a token of the profoundest respect in which he and his work are held.