David Szalay, Booker Prize-winning author, opens the 97th Festive Book Week

We are delighted to announce that this year’s 97th Budapest Festive Book Week will be opened by the Booker Prize-winning, Hungarian-born Canadian–British author David Szalay on Thursday, June 11, at 4:00 PM, and that readers will have the opportunity to meet him during a podium discussion on Friday, June 12.

The author is a leading figure in contemporary English-language prose and the first Hungarian–British writer to win the Booker Prize. He was born in Montréal, grew up in London, lived in Hungary for ten years, and currently works in Vienna. He is the author of six novels, translated into more than twenty languages, and has also written radio plays for the BBC.

His international breakthrough came with All That Man Is, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, and in 2025 he won the prestigious award with his novel Flesh. As this year’s Booker Prize winner, Flesh celebrates not only Szalay’s individual achievement but – in the words of jury chair Roddy Doyle – a novel that boldly takes risks formally, thematically, and ethically, while weaving together body and soul, silence and absence, word and space in an extraordinary way. The book will be published in Hungarian as Test by Libri Publishing House for this year’s Book Week.