"The universal trickster has been at work on my life in all sorts of wild ways," Irish novelist Paul Lynch tells me the morning after he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, which imagines Ireland taken over by a fascist regime.
Before beginning the novel, Lynch had spent months writing "the wrong book". Then, one Friday afternoon, he realized it was dead. The following Monday he sat in his shed at the bottom of his garden in Dublin, opened a new Word document and the first page of Prophet Song came to him almost as it appears in the novel. He describes it as "one of the miracles" of his writing life. "The entire meaning of what was to come in the book is encoded in those first few lines and yet I didn't know what I was going to write."
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