David Szalay

Szalay was born in Montreal to a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, moved to London as an infant, and grew up largely oblivious to his Hungarian half until adulthood; he read philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford before years of freelance work, including scripting audio dramas for radio, while writing fiction on the side.

All That Man Is (2016), Booker-shortlisted, traced nine men at different ages across contemporary Europe in interlinked stories cataloguing masculinity's quiet failures and small humiliations, its structure openly modeled on a life's arc rather than a single plot.

Flesh (2025) followed István, a taciturn Hungarian man, from an impoverished childhood through military service, prison, and an improbable rise into London's moneyed elite, its terse, gapped prose skipping whole years at a stroke; the novel won the Booker Prize, cementing Szalay's reputation as one of Europe's essential chroniclers of drifting, unexamined masculinity. He has lived for years in Budapest.