booker prize

Nearly a decade after his 2016 novel, “All That Man Is,” was passed over for the Booker Prize, David Szalay has taken home gold with his latest work, “Flesh.”

“Flesh,” Szalay’s sixth novel, follows István, a socially isolated Hungarian teen who through circumstances beyond his control is thrust into London’s upper echelon. In the coming decades, he finds himself caught between his traumatic past and growing appetite for prestige. Szalay is the first Hungarian British writer to receive the prestigious award, which he accepted at Monday’s ceremony in London with visible surprise.

“I felt ‘Flesh’ is quite a risky novel, a risky book. It felt risky to me writing it,” Szalay said in his acceptance speech.

“I think it’s very important that the publisher — the novel-making community, if I can put it like that — embraces that sense of risk rather than shuns it,” he said.

In the judges’ view, Szalay’s risks more than paid off, yielding an “extraordinary, singular novel.”

“The judges discussed the six books on the shortlist for more than five hours,” said Roddy Doyle, chair of the judging panel. “The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the other great novels, was ‘Flesh’ — because of its singularity.”

“We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read,” he said.

Despite chronicling decades of István’s life, “Flesh,” through narrative omissions, leaves readers with an inscrutable protagonist they nonetheless remain deeply invested in.

“I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well,” Doyle said, adding that in “Flesh,” “Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter.”

The Booker Prize is an annual award given to the best English-language novel published in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“Flesh” triumphed over five other shortlisted books: Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” Andrew Miller’s “The Land in Winter,” Susan Choi’s “Flashlight,” Katie Kitamura’s “Audition” and Ben Markovits’ “The Rest of Our Lives.”

“Flesh” has also received praise from writer Zadie Smith and singer Dua Lipa, who selected the novel for her Service95 Book Club.

“I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a character who has so little to say as István and yet by the end of it I cared about him so deeply,” Lipa told Szalay in an October interview at the New York Public Library.

During their conversation, Szalay shared that while “Flesh” was the file name for the book on his computer, he never expected it to get to the final press.

Yet his team couldn’t think of another title more fitting for the novel.

“The kind of slight unease that I think it provokes, that sense of tawdriness, I think that they really fit the book, ultimately,” Szalay said.