By https://www.abc.net.au/news/gina-rushton/105053318
Publication Date: 2026-05-29 21:24:00
David Szalay is joined between press events at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
In 2025, the Hungarian-British author won the Booker Prize for “Flesh,” which follows teenager István on his journey through his working-class beginnings in Hungary and ultimately into the world of London’s elite. Booker judge Roddy Doyle described the novel as “about life and the strangeness of life” and by The Guardian as “about what is fundamentally unspeakable, the indescribable things that lie at the center of every life and hover beyond the reach of language”.
Since then, Szalay has spent months articulating the unsayable and indescribable about the book in an endless press cycle of interviews.
We chat briefly in the warm glow of the dressing table lamps that line the dressing room mirrors in the bowels of Redfern’s cavernous Carriageworks.
Inexplicably, there is an ironing board next to us. We ignore it, but agree that I should probably acknowledge that it was there when I finally transcribe our interview.
