Canadian-Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday, November 10, 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.
Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including favourites 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.
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.
Judges praise the power of unspoken lives
Doyle said “Flesh”, a book “about living, and the strangeness of living”, emerged as the judges’ unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.
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 an unlikely denizen of London high society.
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.
“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.”
“It presents us with a certain type of man that invites us to look behind the face.”
Doyle said the judges “loved the spareness of the writing.”
“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.”
From abandoned manuscript to prize-winning risk
Szalay said he wrote “Flesh” under pressure, after abandoning a novel he’d been working on for four years.
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.”
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.
He recalled asking his editor “whether she could imagine a novel called ‘Flesh’ winning the Booker Prize.”
“You have your answer,” he said.
An opaque hero and critical divide
“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.”
“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.”
Szalay’s journey
Szalay, who was born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, raised in the UK 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.
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.”
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.”
Last year’s winner Harvey, who handed Szalay the Booker Prize trophy, had some advice.
“Buckle up, and get a good accountant,” she said.
