Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize diary: ‘This has been the greatest week of my life. This is living, as Camus once put it, to the point of tears.’
“Inside Old Billingsgate, the pressure is metamorphic. Twenty minutes before the announcement, I experience a wobble...”
Paul Lynch. Photo: Lucy North/PA
Wednesday It’s 3.15pm and I am entering the tunnel – five days of bedlam and babel until the Booker Prize ceremony on Sunday. I drive from home to an airport hotel, change into a tux and charge to Dublin Convention Centre for the Irish Book Awards. Inside, RTÉ Six One News corner me and Other Paul, aka Paul Murray. He gives me a sharp hug.
For dinner I am seated beside crime novelist Amanda Cassidy and cannot ascertain how so much darkness can lurk within such a luminous personality. When Other Paul wins Irish Novel of the Year, I am not surprised, though I wonder how I am going to get him out of the building. There is a plan, you see. We are sharing a taxi to a Dublin airport hotel as we will be taking a red-eye flight to London tomorrow to meet Queen Camilla at a Booker Prize Shortlist reception in Clarence House.
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