Irish novelist Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize for "Prophet Song," an intense story of an Ireland veering towards tyranny, a family's response to state violence and the strains of trying to maintain stability in a world going off the rails. He is the fifth Irish writer to win the prize, now awarded to the best novel written in English.

Lynch triumphed from a shortlist of six finalists, comprised of Sarah Bernstein's "Study for Obedience," Jonathan Escoffery's "If I Survive You," Paul Harding's "This Other Eden," Chetna Maroo's "Western Lane" and Paul Murray's "This Other Eden." Other Irish winners include Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright. Four Irish writers were on the 2023 longlist of finalists.

Composed in dense blocks of text, unbroken by paragraphs, the heady momentum of Lynch's prose results in a book that is "soul-shattering and true," said Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, the chief of the judges for the 2023 prize, who added that readers "will not soon forget its warnings."

The novel centers on Eilish Stack, a scientist whose husband, a union organizer, is taken away by a newly formed branch of the Irish security forces, and her attempts to hold her family of four children together as the country spirals dizzily and terrifyingly toward civil war.

Lynch said his novel was in part "an attempt at radical empathy."

"I was trying to see into the modern chaos," he said in a statement on the Booker Prize website. "The unrest in Western democracies. The problem of Syria - the implosion of an entire nation, the scale of its refugee crisis and the West's indifference.

"To understand better, we must first experience the problem for ourselves. So I sought to deepen the dystopian by bringing to it a high degree of realism. I wanted to deepen the reader's immersion to such a degree that by the end of the book, they would not just know, but feel this problem for themselves."

While the competition was fierce and the judges admitted to struggling to name a winner from the shortlist, Lynch's writing style carried the day.

"Here the sentence is stretched to its limits - Lynch pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness," Edugyan said. "He has the heart of a poet, using repetition and recurring motifs to create a visceral reading experience. This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave. With great vividness, Prophet Song captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment."

Lynch received £50,000 and a trophy presented by 2022 winner Shehan Karunatilaka in a ceremony in London on Sunday. The ceremony was livestreamed on YouTube and featured a speech by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a UK citizen detained in Iran who was released from captivity in 2022 after almost six years' imprisonment.

"After five months my family could bring me books," she told the Guardian newspaper. "When the guard opened the door and handed over the books to me, I felt liberated; I could read books, they could take me to another world, and that could transform my life."

Lynch, 46, lives in Dublin and spent five years as the head film critic of the national Sunday Tribune newspaper, also writing regularly for the Sunday Times of London before turning to full-time fiction writing in 2011. His other novels are "Beyond the Sea," "Grace," "The Black Snow" and "Red Sky in Morning."

"Prophet Song" was published in the United Kingdom by Oneworld Publications and will be released in the United States Dec. 5 by Atlantic Monthly Books.