"The country spoke Irish largely before it spoke English. Grammatically, the structure of Irish is different from English. As Ireland adopted the English language, this sort of hybridization started to occur, where the English language was placed on top of Irish grammatical constructions. You get this slipperiness, this ability to move sentences, to place words in interesting places, and to use constructions that you just wouldn't find in England, for example. The thing about being an Irish writer is there isn't a reverence. There’s a sort of implicit freedom to use the language however we like. So long as you have mastery and command of the language, you can push it to the edges."

Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Peace Prize for Fiction, and other prizes. Prophet Song presents a dystopian vision of Ireland and a mother’s determination to protect her family as her country slides towards totalitarianism. The Booker Prize Jury said, “It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.“ In 2024, Lynch was elected to Aosdána, the Irish academy for the arts, honoring distinguished artists. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper. His novels have been translated into 35 languages.

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www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Peace Prize for Fiction, and other prizes. Prophet Song presents a dystopian vision of Ireland and a mother’s determination to protect her family as her country slides towards totalitarianism. The Booker Prize Jury said, “It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.“ In 2024, Lynch was elected to Aosdána, the Irish academy for the arts, honoring distinguished artists. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper. His novels have been translated into 35 languages.

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

 “We narrate the story of our lives to ourselves. We narrate it in linear fashion. And I know many writers have played with time in all sorts of amazing ways, but we're storytellers. This is what we do. And if you give the brain a story, a prepackaged story, you're giving a cheesecake. That's what it wants. That's why it loves stories. That's why our society is just built on stories. Politics is nothing but stories. Everything you do in the evenings – we sit down, we're watching Netflix – just stories. We consume them all the time. We are just machines for belief.”

Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Peace Prize for Fiction, and other prizes. Prophet Song presents a dystopian vision of Ireland and a mother’s determination to protect her family as her country slides towards totalitarianism. The Booker Prize Jury said, “It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.“ In 2024, Lynch was elected to Aosdána, the Irish academy for the arts, honoring distinguished artists. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper. His novels have been translated into 35 languages.

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“When I was working at the Times and the Times Magazine, on one Tuesday morning, the towers fell. September 11, 2001. The magazine had a 10-day lead time, so it was a weekly that was essentially 10 days old by the time it came out. We came to work and realized the world had changed, and the entire process, the magazine had been made for over a hundred years, had to be thrown out the window. We had to create a new magazine in 36 hours that would in some way speak to this very different, scary, and interesting world we were now in. In those 36 hours, we usually would take months to produce a magazine. If you take all of its aspects, it’s a long journey. However, we made a magazine in 36 hours that, in some ways, was the best magazine I ever made because of the urgency of the moment.”

Adam Moss was the editor of New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days. As editor of New York, he also oversaw the creation of five digital magazines: Vulture, The Cut, Daily Intelligencer, Grub Street, and The Strategist. During his tenure, New York won forty-one National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year. He was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times with oversight of the Magazine, the Book Review, and the Culture, and Style sections, as well as managing editor of Esquire. He was elected to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2019. He is the Author of The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing.

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast