David Szalay's novel 'Flesh' wins Booker Prize

British-Hungarian author David Szalay has won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious novel award in the English-speaking world, for his novel " Flesh ." The announcement was made Monday evening in London. The 51-year-old, shortlisted for the influential literary prize for the second time, will receive a prize of £50,000 (approximately €56,000).

The novel shows the life of István, a taciturn figure whom we follow from his impoverished adolescence in Hungary, through his military service in Iraq to his migration to London, where, after wanderings, he penetrates the circles of the hyper-rich.

A striking feature of Flesh , which was translated into Dutch this spring by Auke Leistra as Het vlees , is that life seems to largely happen to István. His passive attitude is reflected in the sparse use of words István generally uses; in the sparsely written novel, his verbal response often consists of little more than a despondent, shrugging "okay."

Not a simple soul

Still, the jury was impressed by the novel's depth. István's inarticulateness was the foundation of his novel, David Szalay explained in interviews, including last weekend when he performed at the Crossing Border literary festival in The Hague. István is not a simple soul and certainly not without feelings, according to Szalay; he just doesn't have all the words readily available to express his feelings.

"I wanted a character who wouldn't explain himself," Szalay told NRC this weekend. "In literary novels, the explanations characters give themselves are often the core of the book, but I wanted something different. I wanted to emphasize life as a physical experience." This makes Flesh a novel in which much happens and much is felt, without those feelings being expressed in grand terms.

Flesh , as jury chairman Roddy Doyle explained in his announcement speech, was the novel to which the jury, after three intensive readings, awarded the prize for its "utter singularity," presumably meaning intense and unique in its own unique way. "We've never read anything like it before. We loved the spareness of the writing," Doyle, himself a writer and former Booker winner, explained to the BBC. "The dialogue was magnificent, and the absence of dialogue was magnificent."

Previous nomination

David Szalay (born 1974), who was born in Canada to a Hungarian father and a British mother and now lives in Vienna, has written six books. He was also nominated for the Booker Prize in 2016 for the novel All That Man Is , but did not win.

This year, too, he wasn't the favorite to win: British bookmakers gave Kiran Desai ( The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny ) and Andrew Miller ( The Land in Winter ) slightly higher odds. The other nominees were Susan Choi ( Flashlight ), Katie Kitamura ( Audition ), and Ben Markovits ( The Rest of Our Lives ). Last year, the prize went to British Samantha Harvey for her space novel Orbital .