AP
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Canadian-Hungarian-British author David Szalai won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “Fresh.” This is the story of an ordinary man’s life over several decades, where what’s not on the page is just as important as what’s on the page.
Zarai, 51, beat out five other finalists, including favorites Andrew Miller and Kiran Desai, to win the coveted literary award. The award brought a salary of 50,000 pounds (approximately $66,000) and a major boost to the winner’s sales and profile.
He was chosen from among 153 novels submitted by a judging panel that included Irish author Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker.
Mr Doyle said Flesh, a book “about living and the strangeness of living”, emerged as the judges’ unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.
Szalai’s book details the life of the taciturn István, from his teenage years through his relationships with older women, through his troubled immigration to England, and his rise to residence in London’s high society. The author says she wants to write about Hungarian immigrants and “about life as a bodily experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world.”
Mr Zarai accepted the trophy at London’s Old Billingsgate, a former fish market turned glamorous events venue, and thanked the judges for awarding his “dangerous” novel.
He recalled asking his editor, “Can you imagine a novel called ‘Fresh’ winning the Booker Prize?”
“You have the answer,” he said.
Mr Doyle, who chaired the jury, said István belonged to a group overlooked in fiction: working-class men. He said that since reading the book, he has started to look more closely at the bouncers standing at the entrances of pubs in Dublin.
“I looked at him again because I thought maybe I could get to know him a little bit better,” Doyle said. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a funny and moving tale of working-class life in Dublin.
“This film presents a kind of man that invites us to look behind the scenes.”
Born in Canada, raised in the UK, and living in Vienna, Zarai was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 for his series of stories about nine very different men, All That Man Is.
Although Flesh was praised by many critics, it irritated other critics with its refusal to fill in the gaps in István’s story, with a wide range of events in István’s life depicted off the page, including his imprisonment in Iraq and wartime service, and with its stubbornly unexpressive central character, whose most common utterance was “I understand.”
“We liked the simplicity of the text,” Doyle said. “We loved that so much was revealed without us really being aware of it being revealed…You watch this guy grow, age, and learn so much about him, in a way, in spite of him.
“If the gap is filled, it won’t be a book,” he said.
Zarai was not thought to be a candidate for this year’s award, but had been increasing the bookmakers’ odds in the days before Monday’s ceremony.
According to the betting market, the top candidates are British author Miller, who wrote the early 1960s domestic drama “Winterland,” and Indian author Desai, who wrote “Sonia and Sunny’s Solitude,” his first novel since 2006’s Booker Prize-winning “Legacy of Loss,” which has spread around the world.
The other finalist was Susan Choi’s twisty family story “Flashlight.” “Audition” is a story of Katy Kitamura’s acting and identity. The Rest of Our Lives is a mid-life crisis road trip by Ben Markovitz.
The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and has established a reputation for transforming the careers of writers. Winners include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who won the award in 2024 for her space station novel Orbital.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
