Born May 9, 1977, in Limerick, Munster, Ireland. Addresses: Home: Dublin, Ireland. Agent: William Morris Endeavor, Prospect House, 100 New Oxford St., London WC1A 1HB, England.

Red Sky in Morning, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2013.

The Black Snow, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2015.

Grace, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2017.

Beyond the Sea, Oneworld (London, England), 2019, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2020.

Prophet Song, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2023.

Contributor to newspapers, including the London Sunday Times, Irish Times, Sunday Business Post, Irish Daily Mail, Film Ireland, and Ireland Sunday Tribune.

Paul Lynch worked as a film reviewer for the Dublin Sunday Tribune for four years until the paper folded in 2011. He has since published his first long work of fiction, Red Sky in Morning.“I have been a serious film watcher for a long time and that is bound to impact my writing,” Lynch told Richard Lee in an interview for Historical Novel Society. “Way back when DW Griffith was figuring out how to make his first films, he went and read Dickens and learned how to construct a scene. We've come full circle and now writers are learning from cinema.” “I'm convinced there is an innate need for storytelling in people,” Lynch told Lee. “The work of Nobel Prize-winning cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman only confirms this is so. And while the modern novel and the postmodern novel abandoned at times that interest in storytelling, and atomized any idea of linear time, I am convinced the post post-modern novel—whatever that is—can learn to reincorporate old-fashioned storytelling again.”

“The novel begins in Ireland in the early 1800s,” wrote Emily Donaldson in the Toronto Star. “Having been unceremoniously evicted from his home, Coll Coyle, a poor labourer, has gone off in search of his landlord to find out why. The encounter leads to a scuffle in which the landlord, a surly, mean-spirited man named Hamilton, falls from his horse and is killed.” Coyle is forced to flee Ireland, pursued by Hamilton's foreman, Faller. He ends up in rural Pennsylvania digging rail lines—until Faller finds him again. “Lynch creates scenes that are almost nauseatingly hateful and graphic, though rendered in startlingly beautiful prose,” stated Mark Levine in Booklist.Red Sky in Morning, declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor, is “a novel of great beauty and violence from Irish writer Lynch. … Lynch's poetic prose is gorgeous. He lovingly crafts every sentence.”

Other critics also singled out Lynch's prose for comment, and Lynch revealed in a Daily Beast interview that his composition process requires an intense focus. “I find my writing life is a constant assessment of balance,” Lynch said in an interview appearing in the Daily Beast. “Am I getting enough quietude to think and read and get the work done? Am I being social enough to make sure I don't go a little crazy? I suspect the writing life has rewired my brain. … I find that Not Writing and Not Thinking are just as important [as writing] because I need to give time for my unconscious to come up with the goods.” “Knowing I have to write, I rise with dread,” the author stated in his Daily Beast interview. “It requires great willpower on my part to go to the desk in the dark of a morning. What helps is to stay focused. Most mornings, as soon as I rise, I meditate for half an hour. When a writer talks about being ‘in the zone,’ they are really in the same place as a meditative state, so meditation trains you to get there faster. After I meditate, I shoot a strong espresso and go to the desk. … I need a very deep concentration to mine the good stuff.” “I am grateful for every day of freedom to pursue this. And yet, the truth is, you can't treat writing like an ordinary day job,” Lynch told the interviewer for the Daily Beast. “Yes, you should be at the desk every day and keep set hours. Yes, it is all about discipline. But what powers writing is intuition, and intuition gets tired. Writing beats the hell out of it. Sometimes, it is mandatory to let intuition go on holiday, even if it is just to sit about the house reading for a week or two. I have had to learn to be kind to myself.” “Lynch's prose is sharply observed,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “and his themes are elemental and powerful.” “Here, as is often the case in the work of our own Cormac McCarthy,” stated Alan Cheuse for All Things Considered, “the beauty and force of the language works congruently with the violence in the story.”

In The Black Snow, Lynch tells the story of a Donegal farmer named Barnabas Kane. When his byre catches fire one day, Barnabas orders Matthew Peoples, his farmhand, to enter the structure and save the cattle. Matthew dies in the fire, and the townspeople begin suggesting that Barnabas is to blame. Barnabas also feels enormous guilt, as does his adolescent son, Billy. His insurance has lapsed, so he cannot rebuild his cowshed, thus diminishing his family's income. Additionally, wasps devastate his wife Eskra's bees, their horse becomes sick, and household items go missing. An exasperated Barnabas turns to alcohol and anger, sinking into a deep depression.

In a review of the book that appeared in the Toronto Star Online, Emily Donaldson commented: “The Irish author's gnarled, lustrous prose style is peppered with local vernacular; his literary sensibility an ornate version of the American Gothic of McCarthy and Faulkner. Throw in an elastic attitude to grammar and all of this has a thrillingly defamiliarizing effect: though he's writing in English, Lynch makes you feel like you've magically acquired the ability to understand a foreign language.” Steve Shayler, a contributor to the Bookbag Web site, asserted: “The characters and their emotions are written brilliantly.” Shayler added of the novel: “It was bleak and depressing but quite beautifully so.” Writing on the London Guardian Online, Hugo Hamilton remarked: “Lynch has an impressive gift for storytelling.” Booklist critic Margaret Flanagan described the volume as “a stunning tale of retribution and disintegration, not recommended for the faint of heart.” “Lynch's beautifully intertwined emotional and physical landscapes have a timelessness,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. A Kirkus Reviews contributor stated: “Lynch evokes so many shades of guilt, pride, innocence, righteousness, and punishment that the book might help found a religion.”

In Grace, Lynch tells the story of a young girl's coming-of-age during the Great Famine that wracked Ireland in the 1840s. Fourteen-year-old Grace is exiled from her home by her own mother, who cuts Grace's hair, dresses her as a boy, and sends her off to survive during one of the most devastating periods of Irish history. Grace is soon joined by her brother Colly, and the two try different ways to endure the winter that follows the destruction of the potato crop. “Grace is a plucky, headstrong survivor, and she survives a great deal in the course of this book, including exposure, malnutrition, muggings and attempted rape,” wrote Jon Michaud in the Washington Post. “Early on, she loses her brother in a scene so hauntingly understated that the reader shares Grace's shock and denial.” “In comparison to the hardships experienced in the novel,” suggested Hope Racine in BookPage, “readers come to see that her mother's choice was actually an act of love.” Grace's maturity is hard-won and difficult, but perhaps not as difficult as staying at home would have been. “Growing into womanhood as a wanderer,” reported Booklist reviewer Margaret Flanagan, “Grace rises above cruel circumstances to control her own destiny in … surprising directions.” Lynch, asserted a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “is a writer who wrenches beauty even from the horror that makes a starving girl think her ‘blood is trickling over the rocks of my bones.'” His “powerful, inventive language,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “intensifies the poignancy of the woe that characterizes this world of have-nothings struggling to survive.”