“I’m interested in this idea of the personal cost of events.

And I think that, if you go back through literature, you go through a great book like The Iliad, it foregrounds the politics. It foregrounds the heroics and the great characters. But if you take The Iliad and you turn it inside out, you arrive at [the protagonist of his novel, Prophet Song] Eilish Stack. You arrive at the individual living the ordinary life and how the individual is caught up within the cogs, the machinations of this enormous thing that’s unfolding. …

I’m really interested in the problem of grief, not grievance. I’m interested in the idea of the political of what is lost, how fragile this world that we’re in is.”

— Irish novelist Paul Lynch, winner of the 2024 Booker Prize for the novel Prophet Song, interviewed by Jeffrey Brown on the PBS Newshour