Body talk Sex, power, tragedy and success

David Szalay on Flesh, his astounding Booker prize-winning novel, and what it reveals about modern masculinity

- Lisa Allardice

When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year's Booker prize, David Szalay, the winner, seems too genial and gentle an 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 is often described as “HungarianBritish”, but his mother was Canadian and he was born in Canada, 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.

For many years, Szalay (pronounced “Sol-oy”) has been critically acclaimed as “a writers’ writer”. But there was always a sense he deserved to be better known. In the past 12 months, he has had a baby and won the Booker prize. “It’s not a year I’m gonna forget,” he says.