Paul Lynch

Paul Lynch (born 9 May 1977) is an Irish novelist known for his poetic, lyrical style and exploration of complex themes. He has published five novels and has won several awards, including the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Biography Lynch was born in Limerick in the south-west of Ireland in May 1977; his parents and all his family are from Limerick and other parts of County Limerick. However, when he was nine months old, his parents moved to the north of County Donegal in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland, where he was raised. His parents settled in the north of Inishowen, a peninsula on the northern coastline of Ulster, with Lynch spending the rest of his childhood and teenage years at Malin Head and, later, in Carndonagh. His parents moved to Inishowen because of his father's job with the then Coast and Cliff Rescue Service (CCRS), which later became, in 1991, the Irish Marine Emergency Service (IMES; now called the Irish Coast Guard). He has not lived in County Donegal since 1995. He now lives in Dublin, his longtime home, where he was formerly both deputy chief sub-editor and chief film critic for The Sunday Tribune, before he turned to writing fiction.  His debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, was the subject of a six-publisher auction in London, and won him acclaim in the United States and France, where the book was a finalist for France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book Award). The novel was inspired by a TV documentary about the excavation of Duffy's Cut, a site near Philadelphia where, in the 1830s, Irish emigrants, mainly from Ulster, were discovered in an unmarked mass grave. It explores themes of emigration, racism and brutality and was described by NPR's Alan Cheuse as the work of a “lapidary young master”. Lynch's second novel, The Black Snow, describes the return of an Irish emigrant to his native community in County Donegal and the subsequent descent into tragedy when a byre catches fire. The novel was shortlisted for many prizes and won France's Prix Libr'à Nous for best foreign novel. In Sunday Times Ireland, Theo Dorgan called the book “a significant achievement”.