David Szalay is a British-Hungarian novelist, born in Montreal in 1974 and raised in London from early childhood, who has spent much of his adult life in Central Europe, latterly Vienna.
After three well-received early novels beginning with London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, he broke through with All That Man Is in 2016, nine linked portraits of European men at different stages of life, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Gordon Burn Prize.
Turbulence followed, a sequence of twelve stories circling the globe flight by flight.
His reputation rests on cool, exact prose and an unsentimental fascination with masculinity, money, displacement and the body, all of which converge in Flesh, his 2025 novel tracing the life of István, a Hungarian man carried by circumstance from a provincial housing estate through the army and into the orbit of London wealth, told in famously spare, almost affectless prose.
Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize, with the judges praising its singular vision and the daring economy of its telling, and confirmed Szalay as one of the most distinctive European novelists writing in English.
He has been named among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.
