{"id":10338,"date":"2025-11-11T07:16:58","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T07:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/author-david-szalay-takes-home-booker-prize-for-novel-flesh\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T07:16:58","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T07:16:58","slug":"author-david-szalay-takes-home-booker-prize-for-novel-flesh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/author-david-szalay-takes-home-booker-prize-for-novel-flesh\/","title":{"rendered":"Author David Szalay takes home Booker Prize for novel ‘Flesh’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

Canadian-Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “Flesh,” the story of one man’s life from working-class origins in Hungary to mega-wealth in Britain, in which what isn’t on the page is just as important as what is.<\/p>\n

<\/source><\/picture><\/span>
Accepting his trophy at London’s Old Billingsgate, Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his “risky” novel.(AP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including favorites Andrew Miller of Britain and Indian author Kiran Desai, to take the coveted literary award, which brings a 50,000-pound ($66,000) payday and a big boost to the winner’s sales and profile.<\/p>\n

He was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that included Irish writer Roddy Doyle and “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker.<\/p>\n

Doyle said “Flesh” — a book “about living, and the strangeness of living” — emerged as the judges’ unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.<\/p>\n

Szalay’s book recounts in spare, unadorned style the life of taciturn István, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as a struggling immigrant in Britain to unlikely denizen of London high society.<\/p>\n

Szalay said he wrote “Flesh” under pressure, after abandoning a novel he’d been working on for four years.<\/p>\n

News :<\/span><div>12 weeks' jail for school IT support technician who took upskirt videos of teachers<\/div><\/span><\/a><\/div>

He said the story grew from “simple, fundamental ingredients.” He knew he “wanted a book that was partly Hungarian and partly English” and was about “life as a physical experience.”<\/p>\n

Accepting his trophy at London’s Old Billingsgate — a former fish market turned glitzy events venue — Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his “risky” novel.<\/p>\n

He recalled asking his editor “whether she could imagine a novel called ‘Flesh’ winning the Booker Prize.”<\/p>\n

“You have your answer,” he said.<\/p>\n

Doyle, who chaired the judges, said István belongs to a group overlooked in fiction: a working-class man. He said that since reading it, he looks more closely when he walks past bouncers standing in the doorways of Dublin pubs.<\/p>\n

“I’m kind of giving him a second look, because I feel I might know him a bit better,” said Doyle, whose funny, poignant stories of working-class Dublin life won him the 1993 Booker Prize for “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.”<\/p>\n

News :<\/span>Migrant acquitted in first trial over US border military zones<\/span><\/a><\/div>

“It presents us with a certain type of man that invites us to look behind the face.”<\/p>\n

Szalay, who was born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, raised in the U.K. and now lives in Vienna, was previously a Booker finalist in 2016 for “All That Man Is,” a series of stories about nine wildly different men.<\/p>\n

“Flesh” was praised by many critics but frustrated others with its refusal to fill in the gaps in István’s story – great swathes of life, including incarceration and wartime service in Iraq, occur off the page – and its stubbornly unexpressive central character, whose most common remark is “Okay.”<\/p>\n

“He is quite an opaque character,” Szalay acknowledged at a news conference. “He doesn’t explain himself to the reader. He isn’t very articulate. So I really didn’t know quite how people would respond to him as a character.”<\/p>\n

Doyle said the judges “loved the spareness of the writing.”<\/p>\n

“We loved how so much was revealed without us being overly aware that it was being revealed. … Watching this man grow, age, and learning so much about him – despite him, in a way,” he said. “If the gaps were filled, it would be less of a book.”<\/p>\n

Founded in 1969 and open to English-language novels from around the world, the Booker Prize has established a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Winners have included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who took the 2024 prize for space station story “Orbital.”<\/p>\n

Szalay said he hadn’t thought about what he will do with his prize money, beyond “going on a nice little holiday with a bit of it and put the rest in the bank.”<\/p>\n

Last year’s winner Harvey, who handed Szalay the Booker Prize trophy, had some advice.<\/p>\n

“Buckle up, and get a good accountant,” she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/sub><\/p>\n

Author David Szalay takes home Booker Prize for novel ‘Flesh’<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadian-Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “Flesh,” the story of one man’s life from working-class origins in Hungary to mega-wealth in Britain, in which what isn’t on the page is just as important as what is. Accepting his trophy at London’s Old Billingsgate, Szalay thanked the judges for…<\/p>\n

Read More “Author David Szalay takes home Booker Prize for novel ‘Flesh’”<\/span> »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10339,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}