"When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year's Booker prize, David Szalay, the winner, seems an extremely genial and gentle author to have created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in recent contemporary fiction. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you have read before."
"Szalay (pronounced Sol-oy) is often described as Hungarian-British, but that has offended Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years earlier. I'm arguably more Canadian than Hungarian. Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make things more confusing, he is over from Vienna, where he now lives with his wife and young son Jonathan."
"In 2016 he was shortlisted for All That Man Is, an interlinked collection of nine stories about men of different ages, from all over Europe, which provoked controversy as to whether it counted as a novel. It was a very, very stressful evening he says. This time he decided to sort of hypnotise himself into believing that he hadn't won. I maybe succeeded almost too well, he says. I was eerily calm and then when it did indeed happen, I was slightly shocked."
David Szalay won the Booker Prize for Flesh, his sixth novel, which traces the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK and centers on a morally ambiguous protagonist. Szalay was born in Canada to a Hungarian father, grew up in England, graduated from Oxford, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. He now lives in Vienna with his wife and young son. He received recognition in 2013 as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and was shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is, a controversial interlinked collection. Flesh emerged after a four-year failed novel project.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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