‘It’s very difficult to write about sex’: David Salai on ‘Flesh’, winner of the stunning Booker Prize | David Salai

WWhen we met the morning after this year’s Booker Prize was announced, David Salai, the winner, seemed a very kind and gentle author, having created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in contemporary modern literature. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you’ve read before.

Szalai (pronounced “sol-oy”) is often described as a “British Hungarian,” but that upset Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian, and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years before. “You could say I’m more Canadian than Hungarian.” Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and has lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make matters even more confusing, he is done with Vienna, where he now lives with his wife and young son Jonathan.

For many years, Szalay has been critically acclaimed as a “writer of writers.” In 2013, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. There was always a feeling that he deserved to be better known. In the past 12 months, he has given birth to a child and won the Booker Prize. “It’s a year I’ll never forget,” he said, his voice cracking from the lack of sleep and all the talking he had to do this morning.

Last night wasn’t his first experience at a traumatic poker party. In 2016, he was shortlisted for All This Man, an interconnected collection of nine stories about men of different ages, from across Europe, which sparked debate over whether it qualifies as a novel. It was “a very stressful evening,” he says. This time he decided to “hypnotize” himself and make him believe he had not won. “It probably worked too well,” he says. “I was eerily calm, and when it actually happened, I was a little shocked.”

Flesh was born from the failure of a novel he had been working on for four years. This was partly due to the pressure of all the attention this guy was receiving. And also: “The central concept was wrong.” Szalay had written 100,000 words before finally abandoning it. “There was an enormous sense of relief, as well as fear that I now had to start something else,” he says. “Giving away two books in quick succession may seem final.”

He wanted to write a novel that spanned England and Hungary, to reflect his feelings of being “emotionally stranded between the two countries.” He says he also wanted to write about “the physicality of existence.” “It’s obviously part of every story, but it’s rarely prominent as an idea.” He opened a new Word document and gave it the working title “Meat.” He says the title seemed very “unliterary,” which made his editor nervous. But in the end, they all agreed that it fit the novel’s dominant concern and central concern: the body.

The most memorable opening chapter came first, almost as a short story. Fifteen-year-old Istvan lives in a new town on a Hungarian estate with his single mother. He is seduced by his 42-year-old neighbor, and an argument with her husband ends in disaster. “I will definitely read the second chapter,” Salai says. “So I thought: How do we move forward with this?”

Move forward quickly. István spends time in a juvenile detention center, then as part of the Hungarian Army in the Iraq War. Both experiences happen offstage. The next time we met him he was working as a doorman for a club in London. Then he got a job as a driver for an absurdly rich man. He himself becomes absurdly rich. To say more would be to give away too much. Many things happen to Istvan, most of them very bad. “I didn’t want to be a coward,” he says. “I didn’t want to evade, or ignore things that were quite extreme.” “It’s obviously quite contemporary on the surface, but underneath that, I envisioned it as something closer to a Greek tragedy, where the hero has to be completely put through the wringer in order to reach a point of catharsis.” The reader is put through the wringer as well.

Szalay’s theme, honed over six novels over 15 years, is masculinity: what it means to be a man today, with its inevitable focus on sex, violence, and money. In 2025, these topics are clearly not Booker Prize-winning. For many years, writers have longed to be called “the new Martin Amis,” but now this may be seen as somewhat shameful. As he said in his speech on Monday, Salai knew he was writing a risky novel. “One of the risks I was taking was writing about sex from a very specifically male perspective, and trying to do it as honestly as possible.” We see Istvan smoking and having sex. Sometimes he eats. “It’s very difficult to write about sex,” says the author. “I tried to write about it as much as possible.” He explains that sex and anger are largely “non-verbal experiences” – and often the novelist’s greatest challenge, as “you have to deal with everything verbally, unless you leave a blank slate.”

Istvan himself is almost an empty space on the page. We have no idea what he looks like, although women are quite willing to sleep with him. (This is his curse.) We don’t know what he’s thinking or why he does things – and he doesn’t seem to know that either. He is a man of few words. Never before has the word OK been used so often (about 500 times, it seems) or with so much meaning in a work of literary fiction. “It’s one of the key aspects of characterization,” Salai says. “I didn’t particularly want to have a character unpacking themselves to the reader, either reliably or not.” The result is a triumph of uncompromising exteriority and brutal realism, at once tragic and comic in its banality.

Careful not to categorize the novel as a mere treatise on men, Salai edited out most of the overt references to masculinity. “I hope it’s much more than that,” he says. “I hope the book is very emotionally moving – and that only works if it feels very real to the reader.” He succeeded. It is a feat of authorial magic that manages to make us care so deeply about an unrecognizable protagonist that, in a crucial moment of moral reckoning, we are unsure how he will act.

For all the novel’s focus on the body, Istvan exists at a specific historical moment. The novel, which spans nearly the author’s entire life, mentions external events, from the Iraq War to migration from Eastern Europe to the West, and even the pandemic, to show how our lives are shaped by political, social, and economic forces beyond our control. “The end of communism and Hungary’s accession to the European Union – these two things completely changed the lives of Hungarians,” he says. “Brexit will bring about very profound changes in the UK psyche.”

Szalay is happy to call himself a European novelist. Having spent most of his writing career in Hungary and now Austria, he describes himself as a “literary hermit.” He says he doesn’t really speak German, and isn’t part of any writing scene. In previous interviews, it is possible to detect his frustration with the sameness of so many contemporary novels. Of course, he doesn’t have time for the traditional format. “The kind of Russian novel that starts with the main character’s grandparents, and slowly continues until they’re born in about 200 pages — that’s probably not my favorite type,” he admits. “I prefer short, concise novels, books that don’t tell you everything.”

It’s not surprising to know that Ernest Hemingway and John Updike were his favorites when he was growing up. “Virginia Woolf is also an influence,” he says. “I read as many women’s novels as I do men’s novels.” He’s already in the middle of his next book, which “partially” includes a female perspective, he says with a laugh.

He intended to spend that day in London with his wife. Instead, she will return to Vienna with her child while he stays to talk about masculinity. This is the first time they have left their son with other people (his aunts). “I think this might be a good moment to do that,” Salai says. Sure, winning the Booker Prize is a good excuse to call in the babysitters. “I didn’t really know how people would receive the book,” he says of his win. “I’m proud that he has connected with so many people.”

• Flesh by David Szalay is published by Vintage (£18.99). To support The Guardian, order your copy for £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.