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LAST YEAR’S BOOKER Prize winner “Prophet Song” depicts a fictional Ireland descending into dictatorship.
For me, a Belarusian journalist living in Galway, Lynch’s dystopian vision reads less like speculation and more like my lived experience.
While Irish readers might see his novel as a warning of what could be, I recognise it as a reflection of what already is — in the country I fled.
Our journey to Galway was not a single move, but a four-year odyssey. In 2020, when my daughter was 15, our lives changed irrevocably.
We were visiting a friend in Madrid on vacation together when I received a chilling phone call. The official who called me was standing in front of our home in Minsk, intent on breaking down the door. He was from the KGB (yes, in Belarus the state security agency still goes by those infamous Soviet-era initials). At that moment, we knew we could never return.
The days of the 2020 protests remained in my memory like a nightmare.
Between August 9 and 10, in the wake of the presidential elections, the city turned into chaos.
The internet was completely blocked. I sat at home, my heart racing, constantly refreshing Telegram — the only messenger that somehow survived the government’s communication blackout.
The night sounds of the protests haunted me: police dogs barking, people crying, individuals hiding in building entrances.
Between August 9 and 12, approximately 7,000 people were detained. Security forces used tear gas, stun grenades, water cannons, and rubber bullets.
In the first three days of protests against Alexander Lukashenko’s unconditional win in the presidential elections, his sixth such victory, three people were killed, and over 200 were injured.
As a mother, my primary concern was always my child’s safety. My 15-year-old daughter and I made a crucial decision — we would not participate in the night strikes, which were particularly violent. Instead, we focused on survival and finding a way out.
Our exodus became a journey through multiple countries. From Madrid, we moved to Poland, where my husband later joined us. Then came Lithuania, where our son was born — a moment of hope amidst uncertainty.
Finally, in August 2023, we arrived in Galway, Ireland, our fourth country in three years. Our daughter, who grew into adulthood during this forced emigration, is now a student at City University London.
I settled comfortably in a chair before an unlit fireplace, green branches tapping against the window in the wind, thinking Lynch’s book would help me to understand Ireland better.
Galway seemed so different from Minsk: instead of our nine-story grey apartment blocks housing 300 people, the same number of residents in Galway occupy an entire street of cozy semi-detached houses.
My surprise grew as the book’s events transported me back to an atmosphere of fear more familiar to Belarus than Ireland. Lynch’s protagonist, Eilish Stack, lives in a Dublin transforming into something unrecognisable.
A mother of four, she is trying to save her normal life after her husband’s imprisonment for an ‘illegal’ strike. The protests’ mood grows. The novel’s ‘white clothes’ protests sent chills down my spine. In 2020, after 7,000 mostly male protesters were brutally beaten in prisons, Belarusian women put on white clothing, took flowers in their hands, and went to the streets calling for their release.
The historical symbols of independent Belarus appeared — white-red-white flags and the same colours in people’s clothes — until special forces started arresting people for that colour combination.
The absurdity of repression was obvious when a judge ordered Natalia Sivtsova-Sedushkina to pay 2,320 Belarusian rubles (about €800) for wearing white socks and red trainers visible beneath her jeans. Her previous offence? Decorating her balcony with red and white ribbons. When Eilish scolds her daughter for wearing white in the novel, I felt that same mix of parental fear and bitter recognition.
After five years of brutal repressions, from 2020 to 2025, the protest anger of Belarusians has been replaced by silence and survival strategies that could have come straight from Lynch’s pages.
People in Belarus live by unwritten rules: Never carry a smartphone while walking — not for fear of thieves, but because police might check your social media for forbidden content. Never complain during phone calls with relatives abroad; the authorities are listening. Remember that searches and arrests usually happen on Thursdays at 7am — a weekly ritual of terror. Don’t speak loudly, don’t make eye contact with strangers, don’t draw attention.
In Lynch’s Dublin, Eilish learns similar rules as her city changes. She watches her neighbours turn away, sees familiar streets become threatening, feels community bonds dissolve into suspicion. Reading these scenes in peaceful Galway, I recognise the same choreography of fear and calculated invisibility: how to make yourself small enough to survive another day.
How could Paul Lynch capture the essence of life under dictatorship so accurately? Born in Limerick and educated at Dublin University, he’s a longtime resident of Dublin, not Minsk, Gomel, or Zhdanovichi. Yet his fictional Ireland mirrors the Belarus I know with unsettling precision.
In his Booker Prize interview, Lynch explained his inspiration: “I was trying to see into the modern chaos. 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. The invasion of Ukraine had not even begun.”
He wrote with Syria in mind, but all dictatorships share a common playbook. This becomes painfully clear through Eilish Stack’s story. Like many Belarusians in 2020, she hesitates to leave despite having an escape route — a sister in Canada. She delays because her children are in school, preparing for sports competitions, maintaining a facade of normalcy.
Reading this, I felt both anger and recognition. I left Belarus to protect my children, but I understand the powerful pull of the familiar, the hope that things might improve. Some of the bravest women I know chose to stay in Belarus.
Consider Olga Zolotar, mother of five and holder of a Masters in Sociology. Her crime is organising neighbourhood chat groups for tea parties in Zhdanovichi. These simple gatherings sparked a wave of solidarity that authorities found threatening enough to warrant Olga being imprisoned for four years.
When special forces took her away, her oldest daughter was 17, and her youngest son was just 4. Her husband raised their children alone until her fortunate release in 2024.
Polina Sharendo-Panasyuk’s story is more hopeless. Initially sentenced to two years for scratching a police officer during a home search, she faced additional charges for ‘insulting the president’. Her prison term was extended three times for violations like “sleeping sitting on the floor” or “unbuttoning her jacket.” After four psychiatric examinations and several years in prison, she developed chronic pancreatitis — receiving no medical care. Her husband Andrei escaped with their two sons through forests and swamps to Lithuania, choosing exile over watching their children enter state custody. Polina is still in prison.
Then there’s Tatyana Kanevskaya, mother of four sons, an activist and confidante of presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Gomel, whose fight began when her son Alexander received eight years for buying marijuana.
Her activism mixed with political participation led to six years in a maximum security penal colony. Her other son, Dmitry, was imprisoned for a social media comment and left Belarus after his release. Tatyana is still in prison.
These three stories represent just a fraction of Belarus’s 1,249 political prisoners, including 178 women. Their experiences make Lynch’s dystopian Ireland feel like reportage. Reading Eilish Stack’s story, I remembered the faces of these Belarusian women.
While Lynch captures the creeping dread of emerging dictatorship, his novel differs from reality in crucial ways.
In real dictatorships, the bodies of the disappeared don’t return to families for burial — people simply vanish. Elderly mothers spend decades writing unanswered letters to courts, like the mother of political leader Yuri Zakharenko seeking truth about her son’s disappearance in 1999. Until her last breath at 95 age, Ulyana Zakharenko refused to believe her son was dead.
The novel also struggles with a fundamental question: who are the villains? Lynch never explains which party seized power or why Ireland descended into authoritarianism. This narrative choice leaves readers disoriented, searching for the dragon’s head. While Lynch suggests “It can be read as a warning… or as a simulation of events occurring somewhere in the world right now”, those of us who lived through dictatorship know: the terror has a face, a system, a purpose.
You Irish people, living in a state of great democratic tradition, might find it hard to imagine special forces hunting citizens for wearing the wrong color socks or organising tea parties.
Lynch’s novel offers a glimpse of such a world, but reality outpaces his fiction. He imagines a possible future, but for millions of people outside Ireland this is still their daily life.
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