Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including favorites Andrew Miller and 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.
Canadian-Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “Flesh,” the story of an ordinary man’s life over several decades in which what isn’t on the page is just as important as what is.
Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including favorites Andrew Miller and 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.
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 the life of taciturn Istvan, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as a struggling immigrant in Britain to denizen of London high society. The author has said he wanted to write about a Hungarian immigrant, and “about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world.”
Doyle, who chaired the judges, said Istvan 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.”
Szalay, who was born in Canada, raised in the U.K. 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 praised by many critics but frustrated others with its refusal to fill in the gaps in Istvan’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.”
“We loved the spareness of the writing,” Doyle said. “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.
“If the gaps were filled, it would be less of a book,” he said.
Szalay was considered an outsider for this year’s prize but had been rising up bookmakers’ odds in the days before Monday’s ceremony.
The front-runners according to betting markets were British writer Miller for early-1960s domestic drama “The Land in Winter” and Indian author Desai for 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 midlife-crisis road trip “The Rest of Our Lives” by Ben Markovits.
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.”
