Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has won the prestigious Booker prize for his novel Flesh, which tells the story of a tortured Hungarian emigre who makes and loses a fortune.
Szalay, 51, beat five other shortlisted authors, including Indian novelist Kiran Desai and the United Kingdom’s Andrew Miller, to claim the 50,000 British pound ($65,500) award at a ceremony in London on Monday.
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Written in spare prose, Slazay’s book recounts the life of taciturn Istvan, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as a struggling immigrant in the UK to a denizen of London high society.
“A meditation on class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity, Flesh is a compelling portrait of one man, and the formative experiences that can reverberate across a lifetime,” organisers of the award ceremony in London said in a statement.
Accepting his trophy at London’s Old Billingsgate, Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his “risky” novel.
He recalled asking his editor “whether she could imagine a novel called ‘Flesh’ winning the Booker Prize”.
“You have your answer,” he said.
In addition to the 50,000-pound ($67,000) prize for the winner, as well as 2,500-pound awards to each of the shortlisted authors and translators, the writers also gain a boost in popularity and benefit from increased book sales.
Szalay’s book was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that included Irish writer Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City actor Sarah Jessica Parker.
Doyle said that Flesh, a book “about living, and the strangeness of living”, emerged as the judges’ unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.
“We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read,” said Doyle in a statement.
“I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author … is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him.”
Szalay, who was born in Canada, raised in the UK and lives in Vienna, was previously a Booker finalist in 2016 for All That Man Is, a series of stories about nine wildly different men.
Flesh was Szalay’s sixth work of fiction.
“Even though my father is Hungarian, I never felt entirely at home in Hungary. I suppose, I’m always a bit of an outsider there, and living away from the UK and London for so many years, I also had a similar feeling about London,” Szalay told BBC Radio.
“I really wanted to write a book that stretched between Hungary and London and involved a character who was not quite at home in either place.”
The frontrunners for this year’s prize, according to betting markets, were Miller for his early-1960s domestic drama The Land in Winter, and Desai for the globe-spanning saga The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006.
The other finalists were Susan Choi’s twisty family saga, Flashlight; Katie Kitamura’s tale of acting and identity, Audition; and Ben Markovits’s midlife-crisis road trip, The Rest of Our Lives.
The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and has established a reputation for transforming writers’ careers.
Its winners have included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who took the 2024 prize for space station story, Orbital.
The separate category of the International Booker Prize was awarded in May to Indian writer and activist Banu Mushtaq for her novel, Heart Lamp, which tells 12 stories of the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.
