For British-Hungarian novelist David Szalay, this will be his third step onto that enviable perch. It was no surprise when, in 2025, he won that most prestigious of literary awards, the Booker Prize for his novel “Flesh.” The book is an engrossing study connecting the dots between masculinity, sex, violence and money. It chronicles the tragic journey of a Hungarian-American’s meteoric rise and subsequent downfall in Great Britain. Szalay’s path to becoming a writer is just as complicated and fascinating as the diverse topics he covers in his novels.
Szalay spent his early life in Canada. His father, a Hungarian émigré, had left before Szalay’s birth, linking him to both cultures in equal measure. His mom, originally from Quebec, never okayed his move to Notre Dame. After his family immigrated, he spent his adolescent years living and growing up in the UK. He would later graduate from Oxford University, a bedrock that would one day nourish his literary aspirations.
Szalay’s unique life journey has had a major influence on his writing. He has spent 15 years living in Hungary. Now, he is back in Austria, living there with his wife and their newborn son, Jonathan. Szalay’s wide-ranging influences give him the freedom to dive deep into the complexities of identity and belonging. These themes hit home hard in the course of “Flesh.” We learn that the novel is largely based on his own experience of being “emotionally marooned” between England and Hungary. This feeling reverberates throughout the narrative as the protagonist confronts challenges.
Flesh covers about the duration of Szalay’s lifetime, and reflects on major events like the start of the Iraq War, Eastern-European migration, and the global pandemic. These active external factors work to further deepen the narrative, adding context to the choices our main character makes and each battle she wins and loses. Szalay’s ability to intertwine personal and historical narratives has led critics to hail him as “a writers’ writer.”
For good measure, the distinctiveness of the artist has led the author to win awards for his artistic contributions. In 2016, he was nominated for the Booker Prize for his collection of short stories, All That Man Is. It’s been “Flesh” that’s made the biggest splash with readers and critics so far. Szalay expressed uncertainty about how his latest work would be received, stating, “I really didn’t know how people were going to take the book.”
In developing the characters for “Flesh,” Szalay was interested in realism and depth. He deliberately avoided creating characters who would “unpack themselves for the reader,” focusing instead on a more nuanced portrayal of human experience. “It’s one of the main aspects of the characterisation,” he noted, emphasizing the importance of subtlety in storytelling.
Szalay’s stylistic choices are indicative of his infatuation with the greats — namely, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Virginia Woolf. He reads an equal number of books by female and male novelists. This commitment serves as a reminder of his advocacy for and celebration of literary diversity. That wide-ranging influence is apparent in the complex threads of his writing.
Given the difficulty of tackling these heavy topics, especially themes or conversations around sexuality, Szalay wrote with genuine simplicity and blitheness. He remarked, “It’s very difficult, notoriously, to write about sex,” but added that he endeavored to present it as straightforwardly as possible. In his art, this raw honesty is representative of a much larger and rich questioning of human connection today.
Yet as he weathered the pressures of putting words to page and getting published, Szalay had to contend with waves of self-doubt. It was his admission that ditching two books in such rapid order was going to look like a death knell for his literary prospects. He ultimately found relief in completing “Flesh,” stating, “There was an enormous feeling of relief, as well as trepidation that I now had to start with something else.”