British-Hungarian writer David Szalay on Monday won the Booker Prize, the high-profile British literary award, for his novel Flesh, the organisers announced at a ceremony in London.
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Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including favourites Andrew Miller and Kiran Desai, to take the coveted literary award, which brings a £50,000 (US$66,000) payday and a big boost to the winner’s sales and profile.
He was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that included Irish writer Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker.
Doyle said Flesh – a book “about living, and the strangeness of living” – emerged as the judges’ unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.
Szalay’s book recounts the life of taciturn Istvan, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as a struggling immigrant in Britain to denizen of London high society. The author has said he wanted to write about a Hungarian immigrant and “about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world”.
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Doyle, who chaired the judges, said Istvan belongs to a group overlooked in fiction: a working-class man. He said that since reading it, he looks more closely when he walks past bouncers standing in the doorways of Dublin pubs.
“I’m kind of giving him a second look, because I feel I might know him a bit better,” said Doyle, whose funny, poignant stories of working-class Dublin life won him the 1993 Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.