David Szalay’s Booker Prize win and the role of literary awards in building bridges

Hungarian-British writer David Szalay’s Flesh, this year’s Booker Prize-winning novel, is simply a communicative of displacement, masculinity, and the value of motivation choices. A Hungarian teenager, Istvan, drifts done beingness — a carnal relationship, an older woman, juvenile detention, the Iraq war, and yet a occupation arsenic a operator for the highly affluent successful London.

Globalisation is not an abstract conception in Flesh — it is felt successful the teeth. Some citizens are much adjacent than others. The caller probes spaces, nevertheless adjacent to the bone, wherever quality feeling survives — including successful the look of mortality. “There’s inactive thing there,” says a pistillate astir her dying husband. On a bid to spot his mother, successful a rare, poetic moment, Istvan glimpses the scenery of his youth: “Deer fly crossed flooded fields. In the region are debased hills the colour of smoke.”

Coincidentally, this year’s Nobel Prize successful Literature was besides awarded to a Hungarian writer — the 71-year aged László Krasznahorkai — for his enactment which, successful the words of the Swedish Academy, “in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the powerfulness of art”. The tiny and land-locked federation of Hungary successful Central Europe has produced immoderate singular writers. The federation has besides had a tumultuous history. After World War I, successful the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary mislaid much than two-thirds of its territory and its radical — compelling a crook to a past that has ever seemed larger than the present.

Questions of diverseness and entree remain

Krasznahorkai’s assemblage thesis was connected the anti-fascist and anti-communist writer Sandor Marai, who near Hungary to unrecorded successful exile. In the 1930s, Marai had been 1 of Hungary’s starring literate figures. In 1944, erstwhile the Nazis invaded, helium decided to halt writing; and successful 1948, erstwhile the Russians arrived, helium left. Ironically, helium died by termination successful 1989, the precise twelvemonth erstwhile Hungary began cutting done its barbed ligament borderline with Austria — wrong months, bringing down the Iron Curtain successful Europe.

In a 2025 interrogation with novelist Hari Kunzru for The Yale Review, Krasznahorkai described creation arsenic “humanity’s bonzer effect to the consciousness of lostness that is our fate”. If Hungary’s literate past reflects nonaccomplishment and renewal, Szalay brings these themes into a globalised, unequal world. Flesh explores themes of migration and quality connection. Yet, the institutions that observe specified penning invitation their ain scrutiny. Does literate prize civilization physique bridges successful the wider community, oregon is it retired of touch, perceived arsenic elitist — culturally oregon economically — and restricted to a definite benignant of well-heeled reader? Whom does it see — and whom does it exclude?

Literary civilization reflects the ongoing hostility betwixt originative expression, access, and inequality. The Booker Prize website announces that it is the “leading literate grant successful the English-speaking world”. The longlist, shortlist, and grant process person the powerfulness to alteration writers’ careers with planetary audiences and surging publication sales. Nevertheless, questions of diversity, readability, and gatekeeping persist.

Literary prizes person their histories of omission and oversight. Tolstoy, who was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel, but ne'er awarded, remarked that helium would diminution adjacent if offered, for helium believed wealth was the top root of evil. Writers similar Chekhov, Proust, Borges, Woolf, and Premchand were overlooked. Sartre declined, unwilling to beryllium institutionalised. More recently, successful 2019, Austrian novelist Peter Handke — who denied the Bosnian genocide (1992-95) — was awarded the Nobel prize, provoking outrage.

Training the imaginativeness to care

While the benefits of literate prizes are wide — sales, visibility, readership — we should look for much ways to execute these outcomes. Organisers of literate events should besides clasp publication discussions successful section assemblage spaces, universities, libraries, and parks, wherever a much divers nationalist tin participate. Public libraries should connection these books, and conversations, to little privileged readers. Access tin instrumentality the speech beyond what tin sometimes consciousness similar self-congratulatory echo chambers.

Another, larger question remains: erstwhile attraction spans diminish and radical are ever scrolling, does the caller inactive matter?

On my table is simply a reminder wherefore the reply is simply a wide ‘yes’. Since September, I person been re-reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, archetypal published astir 160 years ago. I person been speechmaking connected flights and trains, astatine autobus stops, parkland benches, and cafes — and I americium inactive speechmaking it. It is, arsenic the publishing satellite likes to say, unputdownable. It is alive, and contains multitudes.

Not slightest of all, determination is the question of however we read. The enactment of speechmaking a caller is simply a slow, thoughtful process. A caller is not a commodity to beryllium “consumed” similar a societal media reel; it indispensable beryllium experienced reflectively, successful an unhurried manner. When we read, we bring to the enactment of speechmaking everything that makes america what we are — our contexts, idiosyncratic experiences, and questions.

Reading is personal, yes; but literary prizes assistance to prolong the conditions successful which writers tin nutrient books and readers tin work them. Novels are 1 of the ways successful which we tin marque consciousness of the world, and bid the imaginativeness to care. As Szalay reminds us, “Fiction tin instrumentality risks — aesthetic, ceremonial oregon adjacent moral.”

The writer is successful the IAS.