Author of novel Prophet Song about an imagined fascist Ireland tells Hay audience he is not a political writer
“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.
“Something enormous comes your way, and you have to go with it. And I’ve gone with it, and I’ve done 200 interviews. It’s hard to process that, and I do worry, who will I be after this? When I come back to reality, when my feet touch the ground, what kind of writer am I going to be?The day after winning, he did 23 interviews, with two 10-minute breaks.
It is a “very dangerous thing to presume” that liberal democracy is going to remain. “Civilisation is such a thin veneer, and it’s so fragile.” He said that while Prophet Song “can be read as a very political novel”, he is not a political novelist. “That is something that has arrived almost by accident. What I’m seeking is human truth.”
Lynch also said that he has been re-reading Herzog by Saul Bellow, a writer “who has been banished. The problem with banished writers, the great dead white males, is that great writing still sits there, and it calls you back”.
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