Paul Lynch has become the sixth Irish writer to win the Booker Prize with his novel Prophet Song, which is a vision of a dystopian future.
He has spoken about how the book, which describes an Ireland sliding into autocratic rule and violence, was inspired by the instability being witnessed around the world in recent years.
The book, which was the bookies' favourite, describes a divided country ruled by a right-wing nationalist government.
The Booker judges have said the riots in Dublin were discussed when they met on Saturday to decide a winner, but that Prophet Song won because of its literary merit rather than its topicality.
Chair of the judges panel, Esi Edugyan, who herself was twice shortlisted for the Booker, described the work as "astonishing" and "soul shattering" and that readers "will not soon forget its warnings".
"Lynch pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness. He has the heart of a poet, using repetition and recurring motifs to create a visceral reading experience. This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave," she said.
Prophet Song won out of an original field of 163 books and beat off another highly fancied Irish book The Bee Sting by Paul Murray which was also considered to be in the running.
The Bee Sting won Eason's Novel of the Year award just a few days previously.
Ms Edugyan revealed that the winner was decided after a six-hour meeting of the five judges the day before and that Prophet Song was not an unanimous choice.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that the judges had established at the start of the meeting that any of the six shortlisted books could have been a worthy winner.
Many reviewers have commented how closely Prophet Song echoes recent events around the world, but Ms Wood stressed that the book was not chosen because of its topicality.
Ms Wood said the book's theme of repression was timeless and the guiding principle of the competition is whether the book succeeds artistically.
She said the other finalists had similar themes.
Mr Lynch himself said that the Syrian Civil War and the Covid-19 lockdown had helped to inspire the book.
He said what is going on in the book is not speculative but is "actually going on somewhere in the world right now. Such a book cannot be speculative at all. It’s actually realism".
He also said he was trying to see into the modern chaos and unrest of modern democracies.
He said: "I wondered about how the real is no longer real, how misinformation and disinformation have led to a decline in trust in traditional sources of authority. I wanted to understand where all this might lead."
There were four Irish writers on the Booker longlist, which also included Sebastian Barry and Elaine Feeney.
And with 37 nominations since the Booker Prize began in 1969, Ireland has the highest number of any country per head of population.
The success of Irish writers is being put down to the financial supports available in Ireland as well as its literary tradition.
Mr Lynch said he received two Arts Council bursaries during the four years it took to write the book and that he was influenced by great Irish writers of the past.
"Writers like Beckett or Joyce don’t just produce great works of literature, they transmit into the culture a massive energy and we’re still drawing on that, whether we realise it or not," he said.
The Booker prize is £50,000 (€57,550), but the real financial reward is in increased book sales.
When Northern Irish writer Anna Burns won the Booker in 2018 with her novel Milkman, sales increase by 1,0000% and the novel sold 500,000 copies a year after the win.
