David Szalay

David Szalay was born in Montreal in January 1974 to a Jewish family with a Canadian mother and Hungarian father. His family moved from Beirut, before the Lebanese Civil War, to London, where he grew up. He attended Sussex House School and studied English at Brasenose College, Oxford. After graduating, he worked in sales in London, then moved to Brussels and Pécs, Hungary, to focus on his writing. He now lives in Vienna. Szalay's debut novel London and the South-East won the Betty Trask Award and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He gained wider recognition with the short story collection All That Man Is (2016), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Gordon Burn Prize. His 2025 novel Flesh—a spare, intense story of a middle-aged man undergoing chemotherapy—won the 2025 Booker Prize, making him the first Hungarian-British author to win. He has been listed among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.