Canadian-Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “Flesh,” the story of an ordinary man’s life over several decades in which what isn’t on the page is just as important as what is.
Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including favorites Andrew Miller and Kiran Desai, to take the coveted literary award, which brings a 50,000-pound ($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 István, 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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