[[Category:People educated at Sussex House School]]
[[Category:People educated at Sussex House School]]
[[Category:Writers from Montreal]]
[[Category:Writers from Montreal]]
[[Category:Booker Prize winners]]
Hungarian/English writer (born 1974)
David Szalay (; born 1974 in Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian born-Hungarian-British writer. His sixth novel, Flesh, won the 2025 Booker Prize.[1]
Szalay was born in Montreal in 1974 to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father. His family then moved to Beirut. They were forced to leave Lebanon after the onset of the Lebanese Civil War. They then moved to London, where he attended Sussex House School.[2][3] Szalay studied at the University of Oxford.[4] After graduating, he worked at various jobs in sales in London. He moved to Brussels, then to Pécs in Hungary to pursue his ambition of becoming a writer.[3]
Szalay has written a number of radio dramas for the BBC.[4] His 2018 book of short stories, Turbulence, originated in a series of 15-minute programmes for BBC Radio 4. The 12 stories included in Turbulence follow different people on flights around the world. It explores the globalization of family and friendship in the 21st century.[5] He won the Betty Trask Award for his first novel, London and the South-East, along with the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Since then, he has written three other novels: Innocent (2009), Spring (2011), and Flesh (2025).
A linked collection of short stories, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Gordon Burn Prize in 2016.[6][7] The Spectator said that “nobody captures the super-sadness of modern Europe as well as Szalay.”[8] The Observer questioned its structure and whether or not it qualifies as a novel in the traditional sense: “does it in any sense work, as Jonathan Cape wants us to believe, as a novel? Yes, there’s a thematic consistency that makes this more than a collection, and Szalay even throws in the odd narrative link (the 73-year-old, it transpires, is the 17-year-old’s granddad). But still, a novel? I don’t think so.”[9]
Szalay was included in The Telegraph‘s 2010 list of the top 20 British writers under 40,[10] as well as the 2013 edition of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists.[11]
In 2025, Szalay’s novel Flesh won the Booker Prize.[12]
Szalay lives in Vienna, Austria, with his wife.[5]
The categorization of his books as novels or not has sparked some debate, particularly for All That Man Is[9] and Turbulence.[13] All That Man Is comprises nine distinct stories that weave a larger thematic picture. Turbulence is a collection of twelve loosely connected stories about different people with subtle appositeness undergirding the narrative progression. Flesh, while episodic, more closely resembles a conventional novel centred on a single protagonist.
