transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:08] Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures reflect on the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creative lives. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this edition is the Booker Prize-winning writer, David Szalay. His 2009 debut novel, London and The South East, based on his experience of working in tele sales, won the Betty Trask Award. The author of six books, his work often defies easy classification. His 2016 novel, All That Man Is, comprises nine standalone short stories which share the overarching theme of masculinity. In 2025, he won the Booker with Flesh, a rags to riches story told across several decades. David Szalay, welcome to This Cultural Life.

Speaker 2:
[00:53] Thank you. It's great to be here.

Speaker 1:
[00:55] You're often described as British-Hungarian, but you were born in Montreal in Canada in 1974. Your mother's Canadian, your father's Hungarian.

Speaker 2:
[01:03] That's right. Yeah, that's right. And yes, I was born in Montreal, but by the age of two, we were in London and I grew up here.

Speaker 1:
[01:11] And what were your parents doing professionally?

Speaker 2:
[01:14] Well, my dad, he worked for the radio in Hungary before he sort of left in 1968. And he washed up in Montreal and he just found a job or he was offered a job. I think it was a special refugee job at the Bank of Montreal. So we worked in Montreal for a few years, got married. I was born. And then the Bank of Montreal wanted to open a branch in Beirut, in Lebanon. So we were actually in Beirut for about a year. But then-

Speaker 1:
[01:44] But you were tiny?

Speaker 2:
[01:45] Yeah, I was one year old. I can't remember anything about this. And then the war breaks out in Lebanon in 1975. And my family, my parents and I, and my sister who was actually born in Beirut, were moved to London by the bank as a sort of emergency evacuation measure, really. But then we ended up staying here for forever.

Speaker 1:
[02:05] And you say he was working in radio originally in Hungary.

Speaker 2:
[02:08] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[02:09] And was it state radio?

Speaker 2:
[02:10] State radio, well, there was only state radio. Of course, in those days. He already spoke English. He learned English quite unusually as a child in sort of 1950s Hungary. So he was working, I think, in, they had an English language broadcast, their sort of world service equivalent.

Speaker 1:
[02:27] Right.

Speaker 2:
[02:28] And I think he was working for that.

Speaker 1:
[02:29] Did you go to Hungary as a child on family holidays?

Speaker 2:
[02:32] Yes, we went more or less once a year. I first went to Hungary in 1978 or nine. And I remember in those days, it was behind the Iron Curtain. You would sort of, you know, to get there, either by plane or by car was, you know, it felt quite adventurous almost.

Speaker 1:
[02:46] And did you have a sense that people lived very differently there?

Speaker 2:
[02:49] Well, very much so. I mean, life was very different there. There was a sense of kind of simplicity and almost of impoverishment, I mean, certainly compared to London in that era. But as a child, of course, you're not really aware of things in those terms exactly. You're just aware of this great difference of atmosphere.

Speaker 1:
[03:08] It's interesting that travel, global interconnections are recurring themes of so much of your work.

Speaker 2:
[03:14] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[03:15] Do you think that goes back to those early experiences or your father's history?

Speaker 2:
[03:19] The recurring motif of travel and sort of moving between countries and continents that does sort of characterize a lot of my work is obviously in some way connected to that family history and to obviously my own life more recently.

Speaker 1:
[03:35] As a child, were you writing for pleasure at a young age?

Speaker 2:
[03:39] Yeah. I mean, I think I started writing for pleasure at the age of 10 or 11, I think. I mean, I remember specifically at school we were set a creative writing assignment and I remember that mine was sort of vastly longer than everyone else's.

Speaker 1:
[03:55] What was school like?

Speaker 2:
[03:56] Well, I went to school in London, private school in London and then at the age of 12, I went to a boarding school. It was very, very English. I wonder if that kind of thing still exists in quite the same form. I feel in a way that maybe I was among the last people to receive that sort of very old-fashioned English education, which is almost like the stereotype of what that kind of thing would be, because I think those schools probably have quite a different vibe nowadays, although I don't know. I'm just guessing.

Speaker 1:
[04:34] Well, you mean it was very formal, very academic?

Speaker 2:
[04:36] Well, it was very, it was quite sort of, do you know the film, If?

Speaker 1:
[04:42] Lindsay Anderson.

Speaker 2:
[04:42] Yeah. It was quite that, in a way.

Speaker 1:
[04:45] Right.

Speaker 2:
[04:45] I remember that that film really kind of spoke to me when I saw it as a teenager.

Speaker 1:
[04:49] Well, that's a film about a school in which there's a lot of violence and repression and unhappiness. Was that your experience?

Speaker 2:
[04:55] I mean, I mean, I don't, that would be to overstate it. But there was a kind of, there was a slightly brutal edge to it. But I guess maybe that is just true of all schools at all times, in all places. So maybe I'm, maybe I'm talking nonsense.

Speaker 1:
[05:17] On This Cultural Life, David Szalay, my guests choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. And your first choice for this programme is the poetry of T S Eliot. When did you first come across it? At school?

Speaker 2:
[05:29] At school, absolutely. I think it was the first writing which I encountered at school in the sort of process of learning about English literature. It was the first, I mean, I remember it really sort of captivated me in a way that became almost an obsession. I really absorbed it very deeply.

Speaker 1:
[05:49] Which poems in particular?

Speaker 2:
[05:50] Well, the Preludes were the poems which I remember being really, really sort of hooked by them. I mean, they're just these four very, very sort of tiny poems, but something about the atmosphere of them, the musicality of them, the way that it's hard to say exactly what it is they're about. They're about their own atmosphere in a way.

Speaker 3:
[06:10] The winter evening settles down with smell of stakes and passageways. Six o'clock, the burnt out ends of smoky days.

Speaker 1:
[06:22] In your novel, All That Man Is, the character in the first chapter, Simon, who's on an interrailing trip, is obsessed by the wasteland. So reflecting your own teenage obsession as well.

Speaker 2:
[06:34] I think so, definitely. I mean, yes, I mean, I practically at the age of 17, I practically knew, I probably literally knew the wasteland entirely by heart. And I re-read it some few years ago. And it is wonderful, isn't it? It's great.

Speaker 1:
[06:49] You can still quote it. I can still recite the whole thing.

Speaker 2:
[06:52] No, I know. I can't still recite the whole thing. But I mean, it's still sort of little bits of it are so deeply lodged in my kind of mind, in my imagination that, yeah. And the incredible thing is it's more than 100 years old now and it still feels modern.

Speaker 3:
[07:10] April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers.

Speaker 1:
[07:36] The Waste Land, of course, is regarded as one of the greatest poems of the 20th century, written in the aftermath of the devastation of Europe and World War I, and written in such an experimental way, reflecting that sense of devastation, fragmentation, and multi-layered as well, populated by different voices and characters and references, literary references. What was it that appealed to you at that age, do you think?

Speaker 2:
[07:59] I mean, I think it was the tone of it more than anything else, the music of it, the voice of it, the atmosphere of it, as well, of course, as the specific words, the actual verbal texture of it. It was probably at that point that I became aware of, vividly and immediately aware of the way that words can have this extraordinary beauty just of themselves. And the incredible thing about it is how contemporary that language still seems. It's like Eliot was inventing our contemporary language then in a way that's still current to some extent.

Speaker 1:
[08:41] And The Waste Land is still open to so many readings. What did you read into it at the time and how do you reread it now?

Speaker 2:
[08:49] Yeah, I mean, it's so hard to answer that question, which is part of the reason why I like it so much. I think it's about a kind of a sense that... I don't know, I'm just going to have to sort of tread carefully because I don't want to say something which I later, like in an hour, think was a really stupid thing to say.

Speaker 1:
[09:22] In the notes that you sent us, you said you took from Eliot a sense of literature's ability and perhaps responsibility to address the most fundamental questions. Is this a moment when you started thinking about the possibility of becoming a writer yourself because of literature's ability to do that?

Speaker 2:
[09:38] Yes, yes, definitely it is. And I think for everyone, any writer, the moment when they become, they decide or think or start to imagine themselves as a writer, let's say, it's usually as a result of some sort of contact with someone else's writing or other people's writing. And I think the exact nature of the writing that brings that about in them can be very significant. You know, it sort of sets a sort of paradigm of what writing should be, is, can be.

Speaker 1:
[10:08] And stylistically as well, because of course, Eliot is synonymous with modernism, that idea of the fragmentary quality of the writing, the themes, the alienation, the externalized emotion as well. All of those things are hallmarks of your work.

Speaker 2:
[10:23] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[10:23] Is this where the seeds of your literary style were first sown, do you think?

Speaker 2:
[10:27] Absolutely. I mean, I think that there's, you know, it's impossible to overstate the sort of, the depth of the effect of this, because he was sort of, his poetry is so deeply, my whole everything I've written has it sort of in there somewhere, I think, because of that early adolescent encounter with his work that marked me so much.

Speaker 1:
[10:51] You also mentioned in the notes that you took a certain pessimism from Eliot. What did you mean by that?

Speaker 2:
[10:58] Well, I just mean, I guess again, you know, clearly his view of humanity and society is quite pessimistic. That sort of pessimism about sort of human nature almost, I mean, I'm actually not a pessimist about human nature in the way that Eliot was, though I'm pretty sure of that. But I mean, my own work has, I guess, how can I put this?

Speaker 1:
[11:25] There's a bleakness to it, isn't it?

Speaker 2:
[11:26] There is a bleakness to it, I hope that there's not only a bleakness to it. I guess, yeah, maybe a good way of putting it was you have to sort of acknowledge the bleakness in order to go past the bleakness or to find something other than the bleakness. So I think that that acknowledgement of the bleakness, which is undoubtedly there in life at various times and in situations. And I think that that's important for me as a writer. The idea that writers deal with bleakness somehow maybe was planted in my head as well by that early reading of Eliot, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[12:05] Your next choice, David Szalay, is Hungary. And specifically the months that you spent there in 1992. You'd already made frequent trips to Hungary with your parents as a child, but this is when you were 18 years old. So what were you doing there? What took you there at 18?

Speaker 2:
[12:21] Well, I was in so-called Gap Year between school and university, and obviously it was the family connection that took me there. But what I was actually doing was, I mentioned earlier that my father worked for the radio in Hungary in the 60s, specifically for the English language department of the radio. And the guy who had been my father's sort of boss in 1968 was still there in the early 1990s.

Speaker 1:
[12:47] Then you went and found him.

Speaker 2:
[12:49] Well, my dad sort of got in touch with him, I think. And anyway, I ended up, I was sort of asked whether I would like to go and spend a few months working in the English language department of the Hungarian state radio. And clearly I had nothing better to do, because I did in fact do that.

Speaker 1:
[13:06] And you wrote some stories for Hungarian radio at that time.

Speaker 2:
[13:09] Yes, that's right. That's right. I did a lot of-

Speaker 1:
[13:12] Is it in fact that's your first published work?

Speaker 2:
[13:14] Yes, that was the first writing that I was ever paid for.

Speaker 1:
[13:18] Were they radio plays or was it prose that was read?

Speaker 2:
[13:20] No, it was prose that was read and I mean I read it myself. I mean, I was the only, apart from Charlie himself, I was the only non-Hungarian working there. So my voice was much in demand. I mean, the others wanted me to read their stuff because I had a kind of actual native speakers English voice. But then I got to write some things myself as well. As far as I remember, they were just sort of quite personal, sort of impressionistic. They were sort of my impressions of Hungary. Something like that.

Speaker 1:
[13:48] And what were your impressions of Hungary as somebody who wasn't Hungarian, who had a Hungarian father? You didn't speak Hungarian, did you?

Speaker 2:
[13:54] No, no, I didn't. I mean, certainly not then. I mean, now I speak a little bit, but it was my first sort of real experience of another country, another culture, although charged with this sense that I had a family connection to it and it was part of my own heritage as well.

Speaker 1:
[14:11] How Hungarian did you feel at this point?

Speaker 2:
[14:14] Well, not Hungarian at all. I mean, even less Hungarian than I feel now, which is saying something.

Speaker 1:
[14:20] Despite the fact that after university and after some time working in London, you went back and I think you spent over a decade.

Speaker 2:
[14:27] Yeah, I mean, that really does come very much later. I mean, that was in my mid thirties and I did end up living there for over a decade. Like my parents, when they moved to London and thought they'd only be here for a few weeks or months. When I first went to Hungary for the beginning of this extended stay of some years, I thought I'd only be there for a few months. A few months became a few more months than a year. And then I guess some point in the second year, you have to just say, well, actually, this is where I live now. Those years that I spent in Hungary, they're a big significant chunk of my life. And certainly Flesh, the book, would not exist without that because it grew quite directly out of that experience of Hungary.

Speaker 1:
[15:09] That initial experience of Hungary, when you were there at 18 years old, what was your impression of the country?

Speaker 2:
[15:16] Well, it was, it felt very alien to me, I guess. And it was still, it was a country that was just emerging from decades of communist dictatorship. I mean, it was already two or three years out of that. So, but it was still very sort of chaotic. It still had the very much the sort of texture and atmosphere of the communist Hungary that I'd visited as a child.

Speaker 1:
[15:40] How would you characterize that texture, that atmosphere?

Speaker 2:
[15:42] Well, it was just, it was very different from London, which was the other place that I knew. I mean, it was obviously, it was sort of impoverished by comparison with London. And it was sort of chaotic. And there was quite an exciting feeling of possibility, though. There was a sense, which, you know, that a new sort of a new society was suddenly possible, and things could be reimagined almost from scratch. It's more, I guess, the really significant thing in a way, is how it affected my perception of London and England when I returned, because that sort of experience of some other place means that the place that you've known all your life, then, you know, you suddenly realize that it's, everywhere is different. This place has its own specific characteristics, and that place is like this, and when you come back to the place that you know, you then see it in a slightly different way.

Speaker 1:
[16:41] With fresh eyes in a way. Which we do see through the eyes of Istvan, your protagonist in Flesh, who moves from a kind of poverty in Hungary, and then newfound freedom and economic possibilities in London. That's all experience that you had that led into the books. In the middle of this period is a time of studying at Oxford as well, when you studied English. So what did that do, that academic study do, for the development of your writing at that time, do you think?

Speaker 2:
[17:08] I mean, it's interesting because at Oxford, the way it was structured at that time was, everyone did the same course in the first year, which was, I think, 19th and 20th century literature. And then there was a kind of fork in the road and there were two choices, and almost everyone took choice one, which was just Chaucer to the 19th century. But I was one of the few people who took choice two, which was a course that sort of ended with Chaucer and began, it was sort of medieval literature going right back to sort of Beowulf and Old English. And I don't know why I did this. It seems like a slightly crazy decision in retrospect. And in fact, I quickly got very bored with sort of learning Old Norse grammar and stuff like that. But it meant that I didn't have the sort of classic education in literature that you would expect someone who'd studied that at a university like Oxford to have. You know, there are sort of pluses and minuses to that, I guess. So I wasn't sort of trained as a literary critic, if you like. It was basically studying dead languages. It was sort of philology. It was a very different exercise.

Speaker 1:
[18:22] But what were the pluses and minuses in the way that they affected the writing that was probably developing?

Speaker 2:
[18:27] Well, I mean, in a way, I think maybe a plus, and this is impossible to sort of verify, but my approach to literature was never sort of filtered through that sort of academic, academic, I didn't.

Speaker 1:
[18:44] Well, critics have talked about the originality of your voice and the fact that it's a fresh approach, that it breaks a lot of the rules sometimes.

Speaker 2:
[18:52] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[18:52] Do you think that goes back to this almost untutored approach?

Speaker 2:
[18:56] I mean, I think, I mean, yeah, I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. It meant that I kind of wasn't, I didn't sort of systematically study all of English literature as we know it. And so I didn't have this sort of sense of, of exactly this sense of, I'm a bit more of an autodidact, I guess, in a way, in terms of my reading than I would have been otherwise, weirdly. So, so there's that.

Speaker 1:
[19:20] And when you weren't reading the Old Norse legends, what were you reading for pleasure in terms of novels?

Speaker 2:
[19:27] I can't really remember. I think I, I mean, I actually stopped. I mean, I think I stopped reading. There was, you know, obviously there are different periods in your life. Sometimes you read a lot and sometimes you read less. I think I didn't read much contemporary literature or sort of, you know, relatively contemporary literature at that time at all. I think I sort of lost touch with it. I became very disillusioned with the whole thing as a result of having to study this kind of old Norse type stuff. And I ended up not getting a very good degree, in fact, which also affected my life quite a lot, I think, because if I had got a better degree, I might have had a very different life. You know, I mean, I did get a degree, just not the kind of sort of first or two, one or whatever that would pave the way to a job, like many of my contemporaries, that that path was not sort of so easily open to me as a result of this, which meant that I was sort of thrown back on, well, I kind of went through a period of drift in my 20s, which, you know, I mean, I can't ascribe that entirely.

Speaker 1:
[20:35] Well, you're working in a call center.

Speaker 2:
[20:36] To the kind of ravages of Old North.

Speaker 1:
[20:38] Some of the jobs that you were doing.

Speaker 2:
[20:40] I spent years working in not a call center, but a telephone sales outfit, a tele sales outfit. And so, yeah, there was this real sense of sort of drift and absolutely no sense of having any sort of career or anything like that.

Speaker 1:
[20:57] But the life was sort of on the margins, those are menial jobs. So much of that experience has clearly fed in to the books as well. Absolutely. The experiences of the characters you write about. But it raises the question, if you had got a better degree at Oxford, maybe you wouldn't be writing literature, maybe you'd be doing a totally different kind of job.

Speaker 2:
[21:16] Yes, I'd probably be sitting in a sort of lawyer's office in the city or something, you know. I wouldn't be sitting here having this fascinating discussion with you. So that's what I mean. I can't sort of demonstrate this, but I just have this feeling that that was one of these extraordinary forks in the road, this decision to study this course rather than that course, which had sort of incalculable consequences.

Speaker 1:
[21:41] So when you're doing these jobs, which I mean from one job to another, were you thinking this is experience which will feed into, I can create characters from these people that I see around me, or did you start writing because it was the only way out at that moment?

Speaker 2:
[21:55] Well, both really. Writing my first novel was about telephone salesman, it's called London and The South East. It obviously drew very directly on my years in that world. I tried to write about that world several times, unsuccessfully, and it really clicked when I stopped trying to put myself at the center of it, I guess. The first few attempts to write about it, I think I sort of, at the center of the story was some character vaguely like me. But then when I, instead of putting myself at the center of it, I put another character, a sort of career salesman older than me.

Speaker 1:
[22:31] Based on somebody you worked with?

Speaker 2:
[22:33] Based on a number of people I worked with. It was a sort of composite character, but very much taken from my experience of that world and working there for some years. Suddenly that it kind of unlocked the whole thing and also approaching it as a comedy very deliberately and explicitly. Those years of working doing that kind of rather grubby job gave me this novel. They were the entry to that in a way.

Speaker 1:
[22:59] Gave you a sort of authorial approach because in all of the books, you're writing very much about other people. Now, I know all novelists write about other people, but very often there is an autobiographical element or.

Speaker 2:
[23:11] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[23:11] Are there any of the characters do you think in your books which are kind of more closely aligned to your own life and experience?

Speaker 2:
[23:18] Some of the characters in All That Man Is, one of the characters in All That Man Is, for instance, is an academic specializing in sort of anglo-saxon and sort of old Germanic and stuff. And he's a sort of version of what I might have become if I'd actually liked that stuff and got a first. But yeah, I think with London and the Southeast, it did sort of set a pattern, you're right, where I sort of would write about someone who very obviously wasn't me, someone whose whole life was very different from my own. And also I was sort of drawn to the banal grubbiness of it. And I think that that has also set a pattern of some kind.

Speaker 1:
[24:02] Your next choice, David, the films of New Hollywood, the American films of the early 1970s made by a new wave of young writers and directors, which films in particular are you thinking of?

Speaker 2:
[24:13] Well, I mean, I love that period of cinema very much. I think that obviously there are certain films in that period that everybody knows, the Godfather films, Taxi Driver, maybe The Deer Hunter. And of course, I love those films myself. But the reason I particularly love this era is that it's also the sort of slightly secondary works that really speak to me. A film like The Candidate, for instance, or Robert Almans, The Long Goodbye, or The Last Detail, which is a sort of lesser known Jack Nicholson film from the 70s. Downhill Racer, which is, the script is written by James Salter and Robert Redford is in it, but it's a very, not a particularly well known film now, but it has this sort of very much the atmosphere of films of the period.

Speaker 4:
[25:01] Yeah, you ski fast, but you're reckless. You never had any real education, did you?

Speaker 5:
[25:07] All you ever had was your skis.

Speaker 4:
[25:10] And that's not enough.

Speaker 1:
[25:14] And I mentioned that these are films made by new, young directors and writers. Was it the dialogue in particular that attracted you, do you think?

Speaker 2:
[25:21] I think it's the kind of extreme naturalism that attracts me about these films. It's just the sort of texture of reality that they have, which I don't find that in films either before or since, particularly American films, which is what makes them stand out so much. They're so very different from the sort of Hollywood films of any other era, either before or since, as I say. So it's this very, you know, they tend to be shot in real locations. The actors, even the stars kind of look more like real normal people than you're used to seeing nowadays. Or as I say before, it wasn't just that it's only since then that things are different. Things were different before as well in the sort of 50s, 60s.

Speaker 1:
[26:08] There's a blunt, unvarnished realism to so much of your fiction.

Speaker 2:
[26:12] Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[26:13] A pared back naturalism, especially in Flesh. Again, you can trace that back probably to that extreme naturalism.

Speaker 2:
[26:20] Yes, absolutely. But for me, it's somewhat different. I mean, a director like Ken Loach, for example, has a similar kind of naturalism. But the naturalism in his films has a sort of explicitly social and political purpose. Now, in a lot of these sort of 1970s, Hollywood, American films, that is there. But it's somehow not the main thing. There's a sort of sense of the beauty of reality, I'd almost say. These films have a kind of, for me anyway, these films have a sort of beauty and a sort of fascination because of the naturalism, which goes beyond any sort of social or political meaning that they might have. And it's that that I love about them the most.

Speaker 1:
[27:07] What did that teach you about writing?

Speaker 2:
[27:09] Well, it's not that it taught me anything really. I mean, it just it identified something for me, perhaps would be a better way of putting it. It identified something that I responded to as beauty, even though in many ways it's not conventionally beautiful. And it's the beauty of just the intense feeling of reality that you get from it. And of course, it's heightened. It's a sort of, it's a heightened version of just being alive. It's the same, but somehow more. And I think that that is very important for me as a writer, because I do strive as a writer to capture something of that. And I think I always have. I mean, even in my earlier books, that was very important to me.

Speaker 5:
[27:57] That taxi driver has been staring at us.

Speaker 3:
[28:00] You're talking to me? Who the hell are you talking to?

Speaker 5:
[28:03] You're talking to me?

Speaker 6:
[28:06] Well, I'm the only one here.

Speaker 5:
[28:08] I don't believe I've ever met anyone quite like you.

Speaker 1:
[28:11] Many of the new Hollywood films contain a certain view of masculinity as well. I mean, what it means to be a man, with an emphasis on sex and violence and money, a theme that many of your books share as well.

Speaker 2:
[28:24] Yeah, I guess so, yes. There's a sort of emotional and psychological realism in those films as well, as being a kind of social and visual realism. Absolutely, they avoid obvious happy resolution endings. They don't sidestep the more difficult, intransient difficulties of life.

Speaker 1:
[28:45] Yeah, the difficulties of being a man, the struggles of masculinity, the inarticulate nature of many of you. Well, your protagonist, particularly in Flesh, Istvan. The word OK appears, I think it's 500 times in the book. And that is the response that Istvan gives to virtually every question...

Speaker 2:
[29:03] .a single white mass which the doctor smooths and moulds. I'm OK, Istvan says. What do you do, the doctor asks, if you don't mind my asking? No, Istvan says, I don't mind. I was in the army. OK, the doctor says, his primary focus is still on what he's doing. Until a few months ago. And now, the doctor asks. Not sure, Istvan says.

Speaker 1:
[29:27] It is a third-person narrative. We see the world through his rather unsophisticated eyes. Talk me through the stylistic decisions that created Flesh.

Speaker 2:
[29:37] Yeah, I mean, the stylistic aspect, the style of the novel is, it's kind of part of the characterization, I guess, of Istvan himself. It's an expression of who he is to some extent. So that's certainly there. I wanted, though, to write, I mean, one of the things that was very important to me when I set out with this book, I suppose, was writing about life as a physical experience. Not only a physical experience, but sort of first and foremost. And I think that, I guess, is reflected in the style too. I mean, it's not a book which is given to sort of analysis, reflection, it very often deals with the physical surfaces of things. It's written in quite simple declarative sentences, for the most part, not entirely. And yeah, that sort of thematic thing is present too in the style.

Speaker 1:
[30:32] And that exploration of physicality, the physical experience of the world, is that why it's called Flesh?

Speaker 2:
[30:37] Absolutely, yeah. Flesh was in fact the working title of the book. And when the book was finished, we couldn't find anything better. It was just, it seemed like the perfect title for this book, finally, because it does have a sort of tawdryness, as the title, Flesh, it sort of feels like something from sort of horror or porn, or, you know, it has these kind of slightly unsavoury overtones. But that's sort of appropriate for this book, perhaps. I mean, this book has some of those qualities itself, and it's very direct, it's very sort of unvarnished. And it speaks to the fact that the book is about the physicality of existence to a large extent.

Speaker 1:
[31:16] Another film which seems to have heavily influenced your novel Flesh is Barry Lyndon, which was written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, I think in 1975. And he's not normally associated with the School of New Hollywood, but it's a historical story, one in which the protagonist undergoes a kind of a rags-to-riches journey.

Speaker 4:
[31:37] You live in great splendour. Your lady wife knows she has a treasure she couldn't have had and she's taken a duke to marry him. But if one day she shall tire of my wild redmond and his old-fashioned Irish way, or if she should die, what future would there be for my son and my grandson? You have not a penny of your own and cannot transact any business without the countess' signature. Upon her death, the entire estate would go to young Bullingdon who bears you little affection. You could be penniless tomorrow. And darling Brian at the mercy of his step-brother.

Speaker 1:
[32:21] That is very, very closely mirrored by the journey that your protagonist, East Fan, in Flesh goes through. Was that a direct reference to Barry Lyndon?

Speaker 2:
[32:30] I wouldn't, no, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, I know the film, of course. And I'm, I genuinely like Kubrick's films. I didn't really think of Kubrick in the context of the sort of films I was talking about. He's not really, even though, of course, he made films in the 70s. They're a very different sort of film. But yeah, I've seen Barry Lyndon and I actually, I saw it probably at about the same time that I first encountered these films probably in the 90s.

Speaker 1:
[32:57] Do you think it subconsciously worked its way in then? I mean, there are very, very close parallels, almost kind of chapter by chapter, in terms of the journey that Ishtfan goes through the relationship with the woman who's married to a very rich man, and he ends up with the woman, and they have a child together, and I won't give away the rest of the block.

Speaker 2:
[33:18] I mean, I think, yes, I mean, it must have been sort of at some subconscious level. It wasn't really at the front of my mind. I don't think so.

Speaker 1:
[33:25] It's not homage then?

Speaker 2:
[33:27] No, I wouldn't say so. No, no. I mean, as I say, I mean, I know the film, it did make a quite strong impression on me. I mean, it's a film that has stuck in my mind, for sure. And many of the, possibly many of the sort of the sort of the overall arc of the story maybe was influenced by it in some way. But it wasn't really a conscious homage, no.

Speaker 1:
[33:50] The winner of the 2025 Booker Prize is Flesh. Flesh won the Booker Prize in 2025. What did the award mean to you other than massively increasing the sales?

Speaker 2:
[34:05] Yeah, it's, it's of course sunk in by now. And I've sort of, it's become part of reality if you like, but I'm not sure. I'm, I was halfway through, I am halfway through a new book and I was already halfway through it or roughly halfway through it when, when the award was given. And I think I'm very grateful for that. I wouldn't want to have to sort of face a blank page at this point. It's nice to be able to go back to something I was already working on and just sort of put my head down and carry on with it.

Speaker 1:
[34:33] Do you think it would have put a lot of pressure on you if you hadn't already had an idea?

Speaker 2:
[34:37] It would have put the kind of pressure, I guess there'd be a sort of sense like if I was facing a blank page now, it would sort of this feeling of, you know, this sort of ridiculous self-conscious feeling of, so what would a Booker Prize winner right now? That feeling might have been a bit sort of difficult initially anyway to deal with. I mean, I've noticed that there's very often quite a long gap when someone wins this prize between that and their next book coming out. So I think it's probably quite a common difficulty that people encounter.

Speaker 1:
[35:10] Do you think that's because of the obligations of the publicity circuit, because your publishers want you to ride that wave, or is it because it raises the bar so high in terms of expectations and that pressure on riders?

Speaker 2:
[35:22] I think initially there's a lot of other demands on your time. I mean, I've been very busy the last few months, traveling and so on. But then after that, I think it's... I mean, and then of course you probably have more money than you had before so that the sort of urgency of writing something else isn't quite there maybe for a few years. So there's that too. But I think there is also this thing of, you know, now I have to sort of meet the expectations of the world. They've sort of put this label on me and now I have to live up to it. I think that there probably is, there probably is that. So I'm very glad that I was already well into the next one before this happened. I mean, can you tell us anything about it? No. I think it's not quite ready for me to talk about.

Speaker 1:
[36:05] Is it about a man or a series of men?

Speaker 2:
[36:08] No. I mean, yes, but it also has a more prominent female character in many of my recent books. So it's perhaps a little bit different in that way. But it has some similar characteristics. It consists of a number of parts that are not necessarily connected in a directly narrative way, which seems to be very much the way that I operate these days.

Speaker 1:
[36:31] Yes. It has been said about not only flesh, but also a turbulence series of interconnected stories, but also All That Man Is as well. I mean, there are these novels which seem to be kind of collections of short stories, almost masquerading as novels, but you are adamant these are novels rather than short story.

Speaker 2:
[36:50] Each case is a bit different. I mean, I think Flesh is just a novel.

Speaker 1:
[36:54] It's a unified story.

Speaker 2:
[36:55] It's a unified story, but nevertheless, the chapters are quite self-contained and many of them could almost stand on their own as individual pieces of writing. It was deliberately written like that and I wanted each chapter to be a unified whole in itself. But I think Flesh is pretty uncontroversially at the end of the day, a novel. Turbulence, I would regard as more of a short story collection than a novel in a way. All That Man Is is probably the most interestingly hybrid one. I think of it, if not as a novel, then certainly as a unified work, as one thing, indivisible. It's obviously each story is about a different character, so it doesn't conform to that. The criterion of the traditional novel, but...

Speaker 1:
[37:41] And it was nominated for the Booker Prize. It was, it was. It was classified as a novel under those terms.

Speaker 2:
[37:45] Yeah, but apparently, I was told that it might have been a problem for it in the judging room, that there was discussion about whether or not this was in fact a novel. And in fact, they changed the Booker rules.

Speaker 1:
[37:58] As a result?

Speaker 2:
[37:59] As a result of that.

Speaker 1:
[38:00] To make it more clearly definable what a novel is?

Speaker 2:
[38:04] No, no. On the contrary, they changed the rules so that there would not have been any question that All That Man Is qualified. In other words, books that inhabited some sort of hybrid zone.

Speaker 1:
[38:17] The rumours that leaked out from the judging room suggested that it was a close run thing. So did you feel almost vindicated 10 years on when you won for Flesh?

Speaker 2:
[38:27] Maybe vindicated as, well, maybe yes. Maybe, maybe just yes. I mean, it was certainly nice.

Speaker 1:
[38:33] Were you disappointed when you didn't win first time round?

Speaker 2:
[38:37] I was, of course, I was. And the funny thing is that I was very disappointed. And on the evening in 2016, the ceremony evening was very, very stressful for me. I felt that a tremendous amount was at stake and then I was disappointed when I didn't win. So last year, I was very, very keen not to just have exactly the same experience again. So I really prepared myself for this by really just telling myself, I'm not going to win, but nevertheless, that's fine. It's great to be shortlisted. The book's been very well received. It's doing great. Just, you know, enjoy the evening. I really was in that frame of mind, actually, on the evening. I also had quite a bad cold. So I felt a bit woozy. I probably had too many lem sips. And then obviously the announcement that I had won was almost a sort of, ironically, a sort of out of body experience. It was a very, very extraordinary, strange moment, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[39:35] And there's a film adaptation on the way as well, I think.

Speaker 2:
[39:38] It's been optioned, which in itself doesn't necessarily mean much, but my understanding is that there may well be a film. Yeah, there's probably at least a 50-50 chance that a film will be made, which is great.

Speaker 1:
[39:50] Do you think if it does get to that point, you would like to be there in the writing room?

Speaker 2:
[39:54] I think I will be. I mean, it is almost at that point. I mean, I had a meeting with the people who will be working on the script just a few days ago, and I will be involved in the script, at least initially. I mean, it's not quite clear how it's going to work, and certainly once the script is finished, at that point, I will absolutely step back. If the film is made by its house productions who have optioned it, if it is made by them, they have a director who they will use, that's decided, and he's a very good director. I'm very happy to leave it in his hands.

Speaker 1:
[40:24] And as a writer, as a novelist, what drives you on creatively?

Speaker 2:
[40:30] I think I just like doing it. It's just, I enjoy it. There are other things, there are sort of, but ultimately it's that. I think it's just the pleasure of it.

Speaker 1:
[40:39] The writing routine, do you race to the desk in the morning, and is this the anticipation of who you're going to meet on the page today?

Speaker 2:
[40:47] Sometimes, yeah. I mean, when it's sort of humming along, then yeah, I do, I do enjoy it. I do look forward to, I mean, I'm quite strict with myself even at the sort of more, when I'm doing a kind of daily routine of writing, which I'm not always doing, of course, but when I am, there isn't only a sort of minimum number of words, but there's a maximum number of words I can do each day. So that, and it's always great if I sort of get to that point, make myself stop, and then I really look forward to resuming it the next day.

Speaker 1:
[41:15] And do you start a novel with an architecture, a narrative structure? Yeah, yeah. So you always know how it's going to end and how you're going to get...

Speaker 2:
[41:24] I tend to have quite a clear picture of the whole thing. I tend to sort of see quite clearly where it's going. When I start, that's quite important to me.

Speaker 1:
[41:32] And that's the same with the new one?

Speaker 2:
[41:34] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[41:34] That you're halfway through.

Speaker 2:
[41:35] Yeah, which I'm not talking about.

Speaker 1:
[41:37] But you know where you're heading.

Speaker 2:
[41:39] I do, I do, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:40] David Szalay, thank you very much indeed for sharing your cultural life with us.

Speaker 2:
[41:44] Thank you, it's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1:
[41:52] Well, I do hope you enjoyed my conversation with David Szalay, who now joins a packed shelf full of fellow Booker Prize winning novelists in our archive. Previous guests have included Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Bernadine Evaristo, Douglas Stewart, Julian Barnes, Marlon James, Penelope Lively, and Ian McEwan. You can find them all and every other episode in BBC Sounds, or wherever you get your podcasts internationally. And please do subscribe so that you never miss an episode. From me, John Wilson, and series producer Edwina Pitman, thank you very much indeed for listening to This Cultural Life.

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