{"id":133056,"date":"2025-11-11T00:01:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T00:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/133056\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T00:01:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T00:01:07","slug":"david-szalay-wins-for-flesh-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/133056\/","title":{"rendered":"David Szalay wins for Flesh \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Szalay\u2019s novel Flesh<\/a>, a meditation on male sexuality and violence, migration, class and power, has won this year\u2019s Booker Prize<\/a>, worth \u00a350,000, presented to him by last year\u2019s winner Samantha Harvey at a ceremony in London this evening. <\/p>\n

Szalay\u2019s sixth work of fiction is a lean, propulsive and compelling portrait of a man unravelled by events beyond his grasp, and the formative experiences that can reverberate across a lifetime. It charts Istv\u00e1n\u2019s rise from awkward teenager on a housing estate in Hungary<\/a> to the mansions of London<\/a>\u2019s super-rich, well into his 60s.<\/p>\n

Irish author Roddy Doyle<\/a>, who chaired the Booker Prize 2025 judges \u2013 the first previous winner to do so, said: \u201cThe judges discussed the six books on the shortlist for more than five hours. The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the other great novels, was Flesh \u2013 because of its singularity. We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the novel, we don\u2019t know what the protagonist, Istv\u00e1n, looks like but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it\u2019s the absence of words \u2013 or the absence of Istv\u00e1n\u2019s words \u2013 that allow us to know Istv\u00e1n. Early in the book, we know that he cries because the person he\u2019s with tells him not to; later in life, we know he\u2019s balding because he envies another man\u2019s hair; we know he grieves because, for several pages, there are no words at all. <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It\u2019s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe \u2013 almost to create \u2013 the character with him. 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\u2019re glad we\u2019re alive and reading \u2013 experiencing \u2013 this extraordinary, singular novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other judges were actor and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker<\/a>; and writers Ay\u1ecd\u0300b\u00e1mi Ad\u00e9b\u00e1y\u1ecd\u0300, Chris Power<\/a> and Kiley Reid.<\/p>\n

Reviewing Flesh for The Irish Times<\/a>, John Boyne<\/a> called it \u201ccompulsively readable … his best novel yet, quietly traumatising, with memorable characters and a rather brilliant last line\u201d.<\/p>\n

Szalay (51), the son of a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, grew up in London. After graduating Oxford University, he sold financial advertising in the City of London, which inspired his debut novel, London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes in 2008. He moved to Hungary the following year and now lives in Vienna with his second wife. After The Innocent (2009) and Spring (2011), his fourth novel All That Man Is (2016) won the Gordon Burn Prize and George Plimpton Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. \u201cIt made it possible to live and work as a writer,\u201d he told the Telegraph. \u201cThe Booker is a precious thing.\u201d In 2019 he won the Edge Hill Prize for his short story collection Turbulence.<\/p>\n

In an interview on the Booker Prize website, Szalay said he wanted to write \u201ca novel about contemporary Europe, and about the cultural and economic divides that characterise it. I also wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it\u2019s like to be a living body in the world \u2013 whatever divides us, we all share that\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Ferdia Lennon wins 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for Glorious ExploitsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Flesh is \u201ca story collection hiding inside a novel\u201d, Szalay has said, linked stories that \u201clean into the short attention span of our era\u201d. Discussing his stripped-back dialogue in an interview with Dua Lipa<\/a>, Szalay said: \u201cI wanted to write dialogue which reflected the way that people actually speak. It contributes to the sense of realism, which I think is absolutely key to the way the book works, which is of course what then generates emotional engagement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe language that I\u2019ve come to use as a writer is very pared down \u2013 unliterary or unshowy, perhaps quite simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flesh is publisher Jonathan Cape\u2019s 10th Booker Prize winner \u2013 a record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Szalay\u2019s novel Flesh, a meditation on male sexuality and violence, migration, class and power, has won this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[35247,5929,93,1840,61,60,10368,99,35246,3422],"class_list":{"0":"post-133056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-booker-prize","9":"tag-dua-lipa","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-hungary","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-john-boyne","15":"tag-london","16":"tag-roddy-doyle","17":"tag-sarah-jessica-parker"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}