Carndonagh’s Paul Lynch has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate at University of Limerick today.
Paul Lynch, who was born in Limerick and raised in Inishowen, won the hugely contested Booker Prize in 2023 for his novel ‘Prophet Song’.
He attended school at St Patrick’s Boys’ School in Carndonagh and Carndonagh Community School.
After his schooling and university studies, he worked as a film critic and senior sub-editor with The Sunday Tribune newspaper in Dublin.
Paul was presented with the Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Acting UL President Professor Shane Kilcommins.
Speaking at the ceremony in UL’s Plassey House Professor Kilcommins said: “Paul Lynch has made significant contributions to the academic community. He is a valued member of the Creative Writing teaching team at Maynooth University and has generously supported our Creative Writing program at University of Limerick since its inception 11 years ago.
“By awarding Paul Lynch this honorary doctorate, we celebrate his remarkable contributions to literature and his unwavering support for our university. This honour not only acknowledges his outstanding achievements but also enhances the reputation of our Creative Writing programme,” Professor Kilcommins added.
UL’s Professor of Creative Writing Joseph O’Connor, who read the citation at the ceremony, said: “From a promising beginning, Paul Lynch has evolved into one of the great novelists of his generation. His sentences are composed with a radiance and power that defy easy explanation or quantification; they have about them a kind of an otherworldly lilt, as though they’ve been whispered through, in a tone at once hushed and strident, from some other place.
“His novels are replete with moments that cause his readers to pause, to be still and silent so that they can experience fully the sublimity of his language, his prescience and wisdom, the wild brilliance of his imagination, the skill and grace of his storytelling.”
These breathtaking skills were lavishly on display in Prophet Song, his most recent novel, which was shortlisted in March for the Dublin International Literary Award, the world’s largest literary prize for a single book and winner of the Booker Prize in 2023.
In 2013, his first novel Red Sky in the Morning was published. It was selected as a book of the year by The Irish Times, The Toronto Star, the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post.
His second novel The Black Snow was published in 2014. The Creative Writing programme at UL was established that year and Paul was an early supporter, visiting the UL Creative Writing classroom, where he answered questions from students and read from his remarkable novel.
In 2024, Paul Lynch was by peer nomination and election made a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy honouring artists whose work is deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts.
“Paul Lynch is a young artist to have already achieved so much – and so much of solid worth – that we may speak, without the slightest risk of hyperbole, of a legacy that will last and will influence many younger and newer writers and become part of the consciousness of readers not yet born. We are honoured to confer on him this degree as a token of the profoundest respect in which he and his work are held,” added Professor O’Connor.
