David Szalay
David Szalay is a writer. His novels All That Man Is and Turbulence are noted for their unique narrative structure, being collections of intertwined short stories. All That Man Is was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and won the Gordon Burn Prize that year. His sixth novel, Flesh, won the 2025 Booker Prize.
Education and early life
Szalay was born in Montreal in 1974 in a Jewish family of 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. Szalay read English at the University of Oxford where he was an undergraduate student of Brasenose College, Oxford. After graduating, he worked at various jobs in sales in London. Szalay moved to Brussels, then to Pécs in Hungary to pursue his ambition of becoming a writer.Career
Szalay has written a number of radio dramas for the BBC. 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, exploring the globalization of family and friendship in the 21st century. 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, Spring, and Flesh.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. The Spectator said that "nobody captures the super-sadness of modern Europe as well as Szalay". 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. But still, a novel? I don't think so."
Szalay was included in The Daily Telegraph 2010 list of the top 20 British writers under 40, as well as the 2013 edition of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists.
In 2025, Szalay's novel Flesh won the Booker Prize; The first Hungarian–British author to receive the award, Szalay said that he "wanted to write a book that stretched between Hungary and London and involved a character who was not quite at home in either place." A film adaptation of Flesh was announced in November 2025, with House Productions as the producer.