Szalay speaks of embracing risk in victory speech
Szalay, who was not expected to win this year’s prize, spoke of the importance of taking risks in writing. “I think it’s very important that the novel-making community … embraces that sense of risk rather than shuns it,” he said.
Szalay said he started writing Flesh right after abandoning another novel that he’d been working on for at least two years, so there was a lot of pressure, and he said he didn’t always cope well with it.
“This wasn’t necessarily a very easy book to write,” he said.
