David Szalay

David Szalay was born in Montreal in January 1974 to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father. The family moved to Beirut and had to leave Lebanon when the civil war broke out, ending up in London. That is where he grew up. He read English at Oxford, at Brasenose College, and after graduating spent some time in sales jobs in London. He holds Canadian, Hungarian and British citizenship.

His writing started on the radio. Szalay wrote plays for the BBC before publishing his first novel, London and the South-East, about a burned-out telesales man selling advertising space. It won the Betty Trask Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. The Innocent followed in 2009 and Spring in 2011. Around then he left London, spent time in Brussels and settled in Pécs, in southern Hungary.

Recognition came early. In 2010 The Daily Telegraph named him one of the 20 best British writers under 40. In 2013 he made Granta's list of the Best of Young British Novelists, a showcase with a good track record.

The turning point was All That Man Is, in 2016. It is nine stories about nine men at different ages, scattered across Europe, from a young man traveling by train to an old man near the end of his life. Each story stands on its own, but together they draw a picture of the European man today. The book was shortlisted for the Booker and won the Gordon Burn Prize. Turbulence, from 2018, runs the same idea through twelve stories of passengers on flights around the world, born from a BBC Radio 4 series.

Szalay writes in dry sentences with lots of dialogue and almost no ornament. The same subjects keep coming back: the body, desire, money, class and the emptiness of people who live moving between countries.

Flesh, from 2025, is his most focused novel. It follows István over decades, from a housing project in Hungary to the mansions of London's super-rich. In November 2025 it won the Booker Prize, with a jury chaired by Roddy Doyle, and Szalay became the first Hungarian-British author to win. That same month a film adaptation was announced, produced by House Productions. As of the award, none of his books had come out in Brazil.