David Szalay has won the Booker Prize, the prestigious British prize given annually to “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland,” for his novel Flesh.
Szalay’s novel, published in the U.S. by Scribner in April, tells the story of decades in the life of István, a Hungarian man wrestling with a past trauma. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “an emotionally acute study of manliness.” The novel was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence.
Roddy Doyle, the chair of judges for the award, said, “The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading—experiencing—this extraordinary, singular novel.”
In his acceptance speech at a ceremony in London on Monday evening, Szalay said, “I felt Flesh is quite a risky novel, a risky book. It felt risky to me writing it….I think fiction…can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other narrative forms can't quite do to the same extent. I think part of the reason for that is just that novels are so relatively cheap to produce. All you need to do is keep one writer supplied with coffee and a few other essentials for a year or two and you've got a novel.”
The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969. Previous winners include Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for Heat and Dust, Kazuo Ishiguro for The Remains of the Day, and Samantha Harvey for Orbital.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
