Szalay, who was born in Canada, raised in the UK and lives in Vienna, was previously a Booker finalist in 2016 for “All That Man Is,” a series of stories about nine wildly different men.
Flesh was praised by many critics but frustrated others with its refusal to fill in the gaps in István’s story – great swathes of life, including incarceration and wartime service in Iraq occur off the page – and its stubbornly unexpressive central character, whose most common remark is “Okay.”
“We loved the spareness of the writing,” Doyle said. “We loved how so much was revealed without us being overly aware that it was being revealed. … Watching this man grow, age, and learning so much about him – despite him, in a way.
“If the gaps were filled, it would be less of a book,” he said.
Szalay was considered an outsider for this year’s prize but had been rising up bookmakers’ odds in the days before Monday’s ceremony.
The front-runners according to betting markets were British writer Miller for early-1960s domestic drama The Land in Winter and Indian author Desai for globe-spanning saga The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006.
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The other finalists were Susan Choi’s twisty family saga Flashlight; Katie Kitamura’s tale of acting and identity, Audition; and midlife-crisis road trip The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits.
The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and has established a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Its winners have included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who took the 2024 prize for space station story Orbital.
AP
