Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has won the prestigious Booker prize for his novel Flesh, which tells the story of a tortured Hungarian emigre who makes and loses a fortune.<\/p>\n
Szalay, 51, beat five other shortlisted authors, including Indian novelist Kiran Desai and the United Kingdom\u2019s Andrew Miller, to claim the 50,000 British pound ($65,500) award at a ceremony in London on Monday.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Written in spare prose, Slazay\u2019s book recounts the life of taciturn Istvan, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as a struggling immigrant in the UK to a denizen of London high society.<\/p>\n \u201cA meditation on class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity, Flesh is a compelling portrait of one man, and the formative experiences that can reverberate across a lifetime,\u201d organisers of the award ceremony in London said in a statement.<\/p>\n Accepting his trophy at London\u2019s Old Billingsgate, Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his \u201crisky\u201d novel.<\/p>\n He recalled asking his editor \u201cwhether she could imagine a novel called \u2018Flesh\u2019 winning the Booker Prize\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have your answer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In addition to the 50,000-pound ($67,000) prize for the winner, as well as 2,500-pound awards to each of the shortlisted authors and translators, the writers also gain a boost in popularity and benefit from increased book sales.<\/p>\n Szalay\u2019s book was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that included Irish writer Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City actor Sarah Jessica Parker.<\/p>\n Doyle said that Flesh, a book \u201cabout living, and the strangeness of living\u201d, emerged as the judges\u2019 unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read,\u201d said Doyle in a statement.<\/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 \u2026 is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe \u2013 almost to create \u2013 the character with him.\u201d<\/p>\n Szalay, who was born in Canada, raised in the UK 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.<\/p>\n Flesh was Szalay\u2019s sixth work of fiction.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though my father is Hungarian, I never felt entirely at home in Hungary. I suppose, I\u2019m always a bit of an outsider there, and living away from the UK and London for so many years, I also had a similar feeling about London,\u201d Szalay told BBC Radio.<\/p>\n \u201cI really wanted to write a book that stretched between Hungary and London and involved a character who was not quite at home in either place.\u201d<\/p>\n The frontrunners for this year\u2019s prize, according to betting markets, were Miller for his early-1960s domestic drama The Land in Winter, and Desai for the globe-spanning saga The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006.<\/p>\n The other finalists were Susan Choi\u2019s twisty family saga, Flashlight; Katie Kitamura\u2019s tale of acting and identity, Audition; and Ben Markovits\u2019s midlife-crisis road trip, The Rest of Our Lives.<\/p>\n The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and has established a reputation for transforming writers\u2019 careers.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The separate category of the International Booker Prize was awarded in May to Indian writer and activist Banu Mushtaq for her novel, Heart Lamp, which tells 12 stories of the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has won the prestigious Booker prize for his novel Flesh, which tells the story of a tortured Hungarian emigre who makes and loses a fortune. Szalay, 51, beat five other shortlisted authors, including Indian novelist Kiran Desai and the United Kingdom\u2019s Andrew Miller, to claim the 50,000 British pound ($65,500) award […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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