David Szalay Awarded This Year's Booker Prize

Canadian-born Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has been awarded this year's Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award, for his new novel 'Flesh'.

The five-member jury, led by 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle and including Kiley Reid, Chris Power, Ayobámi Adébáyo and Sarah Jessica Parker, announced the decision late Monday evening in London.

The shortlist, announced in September and selected from 153 works, included David Szalay, Kiran Desai, who is of Indian origin and won the Booker Prize 19 years ago, with her work 'he Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny', as well as British author Andrew Miller ('The Land in Winter') and three American writers, Susan Choi ('Flashlight'), Katie Kitamura ('Audition') and Ben Markovits ('The Rest of Our Lives').

Born in Canada in 1974, raised in England, educated at Oxford, and now living in Vienna, David Szalay—whose father is Hungarian and mother is Canadian—wrote the novel Flesh about a young Hungarian man István, who grew up in Hungary, came into conflict with the justice system, served as a soldier in Iraq, then worked as a security guard, and later experienced the lifestyle of London's upper class up close as a chauffeur for a wealthy London family.

David Szalay was also nominated for the Booker Prize in 2016 for his novel 'All That Man Is'.