David Szalay, a Canadian-Hungarian-British author, received the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for his novel "Flesh," which tells the tale of a man's life from working-class beginnings in Hungary's mega-wealth in Britain and emphasises the significance of what isn't written on the page.
Szalay, 51, won the coveted literary award, which comes with a 50,000-pound ($66,000) payout and a significant boost to the winner's sales and fame. He defeated five other competitors, including favourites Andrew Miller of Britain and Indian novelist Kiran Desai.
A team of judges that included "Sex and the City" actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Irish author Roddy Doyle selected him from 153 submitted manuscripts.
After a five-hour discussion, the judges unanimously selected "Flesh," a work "about living, and the strangeness of living," according to Doyle.

Szalay wrote "Flesh" under pressure after abandoning a novel he had been working on for four years. He said the story grew from "simple, fundamental ingredients" and was about "life as a physical experience." Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his "risky" novel at London's Old Billingsgate, a former fish market turned glitzy events venue, and recalled asking his editor "whether she could imagine a novel called 'Flesh' winning the Booker Prize."

He answered, "You have your answer."
Doyle, who served as the judges' chair, stated that Isták is a member of a category that is under-represented in fiction: working-class men. He claimed that after reading it, he now pays more attention to bouncers stationed in Dublin pub doorways.
Doyle, whose humorous and moving tales of working-class Dublin life earned him the 1993 Booker Prize for "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha," remarked, "I'm kind of giving him a second look, because I feel I might know him a bit better."
"It invites us to look behind the face by presenting us with a particular kind of man."

Many critics admired "Flesh," but others were irritated by its failure to fill in the gaps in Isták's story—large portions of life, such as incarceration and wartime service in Iraq, take place outside the page—and its doggedly unexpressive main character, whose most frequent comment is "Okay."
At a press conference, Szalay admitted, "He is quite an opaque character." "He doesn't provide the reader an explanation of himself. He doesn't speak clearly. Therefore, I was genuinely unsure of how people would react to him as a character.
The judges "loved the spareness of the writing," according to Doyle.
"We were thrilled that so much was disclosed without us being particularly conscious of it.

He remarked, "I'm learning so much about this man despite him, in a way, as I watch him grow and age." "It would be less of a book if the gaps were filled."

The Booker Prize, which was created in 1969 and is accessible to English-language novels from all around the world, has a reputation for changing authors' lives. Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood, and Samantha Harvey, who won the 2024 prize for the space station novella "Orbital," are among the winners.
Szalay claimed that other from "going nice little holiday with bit it and put the rest in the bank," he had not considered what he would do with his prize money.
Harvey, the previous year's winner, gave Szalay the Booker Prize trophy and offered some guidance.
"Get a good accountant and buckle up," she said.