Kiran Desai loses out to Hungarian-British author for Booker Prize

LONDON(UK): Indian born author Kiran Desai was among five other authors who were pipped by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay, who took home this year’s Booker Prize for fiction for his novel ‘Flesh’.

Szalay’s story of an ordinary man’s life over several decades beat Desai’s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ for the Prize that was held at a ceremony in London on Monday night.

Fifty-one-year-old Szalay, was previously shortlisted in 2016 for ‘All That Man Is’, received £50,000 and a trophy, presented to him by last year’s winner Samantha Harvey.

“A meditation on class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity, Flesh is a compelling portrait of one man, and the formative experiences that can reverberate across a lifetime,” organisers of the award ceremony in London said on Monday (local time).

Born in Canada, Szalay has lived in Lebanon, the UK, Hungary, and now Vienna.

He is the author of six works of fiction that have been translated into over 20 languages,

‘Flesh’ is Szalay’s sixth work of fiction and he said the novel’s central character was written from the perspective of an outsider.

The Booker Prize panel considered 153 books and was looking for the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in Britain and/or Ireland between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025.

Among the six shortlisted works, one kept dominating the conversation, according to the chair of the judges, Roddy Doyle.
He called Flesh a “singular” and “extraordinary” novel.

“We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book, but it is a joy to read,” said Doyle, an Irish writer and winner of the 1993 Booker Prize.

Previous winners of the Booker Prize include Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood and Dame Hilary Mantel. Kiran Desai had won the Booker in 2006 for her ‘The Inheritance Of Loss.’

Earlier this year Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi won the ‘International Booker Prize 2025’ for ‘Heart Lamp’, the first collection of short stories to win the prize.

Kiran Desai’s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ is a globetrotting epic featuring a pair of young Indians whose paths cross and uncross over several years before they eventually fall in love.

Among the shortlist was included ‘The Rest of Our Lives’ by Ben Markovits – who grew up in Texas, London and Berlin – features a midlife crisis in the form of a meandering road trip from Cape Cod to California.

Another shortlisted book was Susan Choi’s ‘Flashlight’, which features a man, having been raised in Japan by Korean parents, seeking a better life in America, and chronicles his wife and daughter’s pain in the aftermath of his mysterious disappearance.

In ‘Audition’ by Katie Kitamura, the life of a successful New York-based actress is cleaved in two by the appearance of a young man who may or may not be who he says he is.

In Andrew Miller’s ‘The Land in Winter,’ love turns cold for two married couples in post-War rural England. (ANI)