David Szalay Wins Booker Prize for His Novel ‘Flesh’

Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including Britain’s Andrew Miller and Indian author Kiran Desai, to claim the coveted literary prize, which brings a 50,000-pound ($66,000) payday and a huge boost to the winner’s sales and profile.

It was chosen from 153 novels submitted by a panel of judges that included Irish author Roddy Doyle and “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker.

“Flesh,” a book “about living and the oddities of living,” emerged as the unanimous choice of the judges after a five-hour meeting, Doyle said.

Szalay’s book chronicles István’s life, in a quiet, understated style, from his teenage affair with an older woman to his time as a struggling immigrant in Britain to an unlikely resident of London society.

Szalay said that he wrote “Meat” under pressure after leaving the novel he had been working on for four years unfinished.

He said the story grew from “simple, basic ingredients.” He knew he wanted a book that was “partly Hungarian and partly English” and about “life as a physical experience.”

Accepting his award at Old Billingsgate, a former fish market in London turned into a flashy events venue, Szalay thanked the jury for awarding his “risky” novel.

He recalled asking his editor “whether he could imagine a novel called ‘Flesh’ winning the Booker Prize.”

“You have your answer,” he said.

Doyle, who presided over the jury, said István belonged to a group overlooked in fiction: a working-class man. He said that since reading the book, he has taken a closer look at the bouncers standing at the doors of Dublin pubs as he passed them.

“I’m kind of taking a second look at him, because I feel like I could have gotten to know him a little better,” said Doyle, whose funny, touching tales of working-class life in Dublin won him the 1993 Booker Prize for “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.”

“He presents a certain type of man who invites us to look behind the face.”

Szalay, who was born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, grew up in the United Kingdom 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.

“Meat” was praised by many critics, but it disappointed others for its refusal to fill in the gaps in István’s story (large parts of his life, including incarceration and wartime service in Iraq, occur off the page) and for its stubbornly inarticulate main character, whose most common utterance is “Okay.”

“He’s a pretty incomprehensible character,” Szalay said at a press conference. “He doesn’t explain himself to the reader. He doesn’t express himself very clearly. So I didn’t really know how people would respond to him as a character.”

Judges “loved the simplicity of the writing,” Doyle said.

“We liked how so much was revealed without being overly aware that it was being revealed. … Watching this man grow, grow older, and sort of learn so much about him in spite of it,” he said. “If the gaps were filled, there would be fewer books.”

Founded in 1969 and open to English-language novels from around the world, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Winners include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who won the 2024 award for her space station story “Orbital.”

Szalay said he hasn’t thought about what to do with the prize money other than “taking some of it on a nice vacation and putting the rest in the bank.”

Harvey, last year’s winner and the one who awarded Szalay the Booker Prize, had some advice.

“Buckle up and find a good accountant,” he said.