David Szalay

0:07Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures reflect on the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creative lives. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this edition is the Booker Prize winning writer David Szalay. His 2009 debut novel London and the South East, based on his experience of working in telesales, won the Betty Trask Award. The author of six books, his work often defies easy classification. His 2016 novel All That Man Is comprises nine stand-alone short stories which share the overarching theme of masculinity. In 2025, he won the Booker with Flesh, a rags-to-riches story told across several decades.

0:51David Soloy, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you, it's great to be here. You're often described as British-Hungarian, but you were born in Montreal in Canada in 1974. Your mother's Canadian, your father's Hungarian, that's right, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. And yes, I was born in Montreal, but by the age of two we were in London and I grew up here. And what were your parents doing professionally? Well, my dad was... He worked for the radio in Hungary before he sort of left in 1968. And he washed up in Montreal. And he just found a job, or he was offered a job. I think it was a special refugee job at the Bank of Montreal.

1:30So he worked in Montreal for a few years, got married. I was born. And then the Bank of Montreal wanted to open a branch in Beirut, in Lebanon. So we were actually in Beirut for about a year. But then... But you were tiny? Yeah, I was one year old. I can't remember anything about this. And then the war breaks out in Lebanon in 1975. And my family, my parents and I, and my sister, who was actually born in Beirut, were moved to London by the bank as a sort of emergency evacuation measure, really. But then we ended up staying here forever. And you say he was working in radio, originally in Hungary.

2:09Was it state radio? State radio. Well, there was only state radio, of course, in those days. He already spoke English. He learned English quite unusually. as a child in sort of 1950s Hungary. So he was working, I think, in... They had an English language broadcast, their sort of World Service equivalent. Right. And I think he was working for that. Did you go to Hungary as a child on family holidays? Yes, we went more or less once a year. I first went to Hungary in 1978 or 9. And I remember in those days it was behind the Iron Curtain. You would sort of, you know, to get there, either by plane or by car, it felt quite adventurous almost.

2:46Did you have a sense that people lived very differently there? Well, very much so. I mean, life was very different there. There was a sense of kind of simplicity and almost of impoverishment, I mean, certainly compared to London in that era. But as a child, of course, you're not really aware of things in those terms exactly. You're just aware of this great difference of atmosphere. It's interesting that travel, global interconnections are recurring themes of so much of your work. Absolutely. Do you think that goes back to those early experiences or your father's history? The recurring motif of travel and sort of moving between countries and continents that does sort of characterize a lot of my work is obviously in some way connected to that family history and to obviously my own life more recently.

3:35As a child, were you writing for pleasure at a young age? Yeah, I mean, I think I started writing for pleasure at the age of 10 or 11, I think. I mean, I remember specifically at school we were set a creative writing assignment. And I remember that mine was sort of vastly longer than everyone else's. What was school like? Well, I went to school in London, private school in London. And then at the age of 12, I went to a boarding school. It was very, very English. I wonder if that kind of thing still exists in quite the same form. I feel in a way that maybe I was kind of among the last people to receive that sort of very old-fashioned English sort of education, which is almost like the stereotype of what that kind of thing would be.

4:27Because I think those schools probably have quite a different vibe nowadays, although I don't know. I'm just guessing. Well, you mean it was very formal, very academic? Well, it was very, it sort of, it was quite sort of, do you know the film If? Lindsay Anderson. Yeah, it was quite that, in a way. Right. I remember that film really kind of spoke to me when I saw it as a teenager. Well, that's a film about a school in which there's a lot of violence and repression and unhappiness. Was that your experience? I mean, I mean, that would be too overstated. But there was a kind of, there was a slightly brutal edge to it.

5:04But I guess maybe that is just true of all schools at all times in all places. So maybe I'm talking nonsense.

5:16On This Cultural Life, David Soloy, my guests choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. And your first choice for this programme is the poetry of T.S. Eliot. When did you first come across it? At school? At school, absolutely. I think it was the first writing which I encountered at school in the sort of process of learning about English literature. I mean, I remember it really sort of captivated me in a way that became almost an obsession. I really absorbed it very deeply. Which poems in particular? Well, the Preludes were the poems which I remember being really, really sort of hooked by them.

5:56I mean, they're just these four very, very sort of tiny poems, but something about the atmosphere of them, the musicality of them, you know, the way that it's hard to say exactly what it is they're about. They're about their own atmosphere in a way. The winter evening settles down with smell of stakes and passageways. Six o 'clock, the burnt out ends of smoky days. in your novel All That Man Is the character in the first chapter Simon who's on an interrailing trip is obsessed by the wasteland so reflecting your own teenager obsession as well I think so definitely I mean yes I mean I practically at the age of 17 I practically knew I probably literally knew the wasteland entirely by heart and I re-read it some few years ago and it is wonderful isn't it it's great you can still quote it You still recite the whole thing?

6:52No, no, no. I'm going to test you now. I can't still recite the whole thing. But, I mean, it's still sort of little bits of it are so deeply lodged in my kind of mind and my imagination. And the incredible thing is it's more than 100 years old now and it still feels modern. April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers. The Wasteland, of course, is regarded as one of the greatest poems of the 20th century, written in the aftermath of the devastation of Europe and World War I, and written in such an experimental way, reflecting that sense of devastation, fragmentation, and multilayered as well, populated by different voices and characters and references, literary references.

7:56What was it that appealed to you at that age, do you think? I mean, I think it was the tone of it more than anything else, the music of it, the voice of it, the atmosphere of it, as well, of course, as the specific words, the actual sort of verbal texture of it. It was probably at that point that I became aware of, vividly and immediately aware of the way that words can have this kind of extraordinary beauty just sort of of themselves. And the incredible thing about it is how contemporary that language still seems. It's like Eliot was inventing our contemporary language then in a way that's still current to some extent.

8:40and The Wasteland is still open to so many readings what did you read into it at the time and how do you re-read it now yeah I mean it's so hard to answer that question which is part of the reason why I like it so much I think it's about a kind of a sense that

9:07I don't know I'm just going to have to sort of tread carefully here, because I don't want to say something which I later, like in an hour, think was a really stupid thing to say. In the notes that you sent us, you said you took from Eliot a sense of literature's ability and perhaps responsibility to address the most fundamental questions. Is this a moment when you started thinking about the possibility of becoming a writer yourself because of literature's ability to do this? Yes, yes, definitely it is. And, you know, I think for everyone, any writer, the moment when they become, you know, when they decide or think or start to imagine themselves as a writer, let's say, it's usually as a result of some sort of contact with someone else's writing or other people's writing.

9:55And I think the exact nature of the writing that brings that about in them can be very significant. You know, it sort of sets a sort of paradigm of what writing should be, is, can be. and stylistically as well because of course Elliot is synonymous with modernism that idea of the fragmentary quality of the writing the themes the alienation the externalized emotion as well all of those things are hallmarks of your work yeah is this where the seeds of your literary style were first sown do you think absolutely I mean I think that there's you know it's impossible to overstate the sort of the depth of the effect of this because he he was sort of his his his right his poetry is so deeply you know my whole everything I've written has it sort of in there somewhere I think because of that early adolescent encounter with with his work that that marked me so much you also mentioned in the notes that you took a certain pessimism from Elliot what did you mean by that well i just mean i guess again you know it's like his the clearly his his view of of humanity and society is quite pessimistic the that sort of pessimism about sort of human nature almost um i mean i i i'm actually not a pessimist about human nature in in the way that elliot was i'm pretty sure of that um but i mean my own work has has i guess a you know how can i put this There's a bleakness to it, isn't there?

11:26There is a bleakness to it, but I hope that there's not only a bleakness to it. I guess, yeah, maybe a good way of putting it was you have to sort of acknowledge the bleakness in order to go past the bleakness or to find something other than the bleakness. And so I think that that acknowledgement of the bleakness, which is undoubtedly there in life at various times and situations. And I think that that's important for me as a writer. The idea that sort of writers deal with bleakness somehow maybe was planted in my head as well by that early reading of Elliot, yeah.

12:05Your next choice, David Soloy, is Hungary, and specifically the months that you spent there in 1992. You'd already made frequent trips to Hungary with your parents as a child, but this is when you were 18 years old. So what were you doing there? What took you there at 18? Well, I was in so-called gap year between school and university, and obviously it was the family connection that took me there. But what I was actually doing was, I mean, I mentioned earlier that my father worked for the radio in Hungary in the 60s, specifically for the English language department of the radio. And the guy who had been my father's sort of boss in 1968 was still there in the early 1990s.

12:47Then you went and found him? Well, my dad sort of got in touch with him, I think. And anyway, I ended up, I was sort of asked whether I would like to go and spend a few months working in the English language department of the Hungarian State Radio. And clearly I had nothing better to do because I did, in fact, do that. And you wrote some stories for Hungarian radio at that time? Yes, that's right. That's right. I did a lot of... Is it, in fact, that's your first published work? Yes, that was the first writing that I was ever paid for, let's say. Were they radio plays or was it prose that was read?

13:20No, it was prose that was read. And I mean, I read it myself. I mean, I was the only, apart from Charlie himself, I was the only non-Hungarian working there. So, you know, my voice was much in demand. I mean, the others wanted me to read their stuff because I had a kind of actual native speaker's English voice. Right. But then I got to write some things myself as well. As far as I remember, they were just sort of quite personal, sort of impressionistic. They were sort of my impressions of Hungary, something like that. And what were your impressions of Hungary as somebody who wasn't Hungarian who had a Hungarian father you didn't speak Hungarian?

13:54No no I didn't I mean I certainly not then I mean now I speak a little bit but it was my first sort of real experience of of another country another culture although charged with this sense that I had a family connection to it and it was part of my own heritage as well. How Hungarian did you feel at this point well not hungarian at all i mean even less hungarian than i feel now which is saying something um despite the fact that after university and after some time working in london you went back and i think you spent over a decade yeah i mean that that really does come very much later i mean that was in my mid-30s and um i did end up living there for over a decade like my parents when they moved to london and thought they'd only be here for a few weeks or months when i first went to Hungary for the beginning of this extended stay of some years.

14:43I thought I'd only be there for a few months. A few months became a few more months and then a year. And then I guess some point in the second year, you have to just say, well, actually, this is where I live now. Those years that I spent in Hungary, you know, they're a big, significant chunk of my life. And certainly Flesh, the book, would not exist without that because it grew quite directly out of that experience of Hungary. That initial experience of Hungary when you were there at 18 years old, what was your impression of the country? Well, it was, it felt very alien to me, I guess. And it was still, it was a country that was just emerging from decades of communist dictatorship.

15:25I mean, it was already two or three years out of that. So, but it was still very sort of chaotic. It still had the very much the sort of texture and atmosphere of, of the communist Hungary that I'd visited as a child it yeah it was how would you characterize that that texture that well it was just it was it was there was it was very different from from from the lot from london which was the other place that i knew i mean it it uh it was obviously it was it's sort of impoverished by by comparison with london and it was sort of chaotic and there was there was quite an exciting feeling of of possibility though there was a sense which you know that a new sort of a new society was suddenly possible and things could be reimagined almost from scratch.

16:11It's more, I guess, the really significant thing in a way is how it affected my perception of London and England when I returned, because that sort of experience of some other place means that the place that you've known all your life, then, you know, you suddenly realise that everywhere is different. This place has its own specific characteristics and that place is like this. And when you come back to the place that you know, you then see it in a slightly different way. With fresh eyes, in a way. Yeah. Which we do see through the eyes of Istvan, your protagonist in Flesh, who moves from a kind of poverty in Hungary and then newfound freedom and economic possibilities in London.

16:54That's all experience that you had that led into the books. in the middle of this period is a time of studying at Oxford as well when you studied English. So what did that do, that academic study do for the development of your writing? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because at Oxford, I, the way it was structured at that time was everyone did the same course in the first year, which was, I think, 19th and 20th century literature. And then there was a kind of fork in the road and there were two choices and almost everyone took choice one which was just chaucer to the 19th century but i was one of the few people who took choice two which was a course that sort of ended with chaucer and began it was sort of medieval literature going right back to sort of beowulf and old english and i don't know why i did this it seems like a slightly crazy decision in retrospect and in fact i quickly got very bored with sort of learning old Norse grammar and stuff like that.

17:55But it meant that I didn't have the sort of classic education in literature that you would expect someone who'd studied that at a university like Oxford to have. You know, there are sort of pluses and minuses to that, I guess. So I wasn't sort of trained as a literary critic, if you like. It was basically studying dead languages. It was sort of philology. It was a very different exercise. But what were the pluses and minuses in the way that they affected the writing that was probably developing? Well, I mean, in a way, I think maybe a plus, and this is impossible to sort of verify, but my approach to literature was never sort of filtered through that sort of academic.

18:42I didn't. well critics have talked about the originality of your voice and the fact that it has it's a fresh approach that it breaks a lot of the rules sometimes do you think that goes back to this almost untutored approach I guess that's what I'm trying to get at it meant that I didn't sort of systematically study all of English literature as we know it and so I didn't have this sort of sense of exactly this sense of I'm a bit more of an autodidact I guess in a way in terms of my reading than I would have been otherwise weirdly so there's that When you weren't reading the old Norse legends what were you reading for pleasure in terms of novels?

19:27I can't really remember I think I actually stopped I think I stopped reading obviously there are different periods in your life sometimes you read a lot and sometimes you read less I think I didn't read much contemporary literature or sort of you know relatively contemporary literature at that time at all i think i sort of lost touch with it i became very disillusioned with the whole thing as a result of having to study this kind of old norse type stuff and um and i i ended up not getting a very good degree uh in fact which which also affected my my life quite a lot i think because if i had got a better degree i might have had a very different life you know i mean i i did get a degree just not the kind of sort of first or two one or whatever that that would would pave the way to a job like many of my contemporaries um that that path was not sort of so easily open to me as a result of this which meant that i was sort of thrown back on well i kind of went through a period of drift in my 20s um which you know i mean i can't uh ascribe that entirely well you're working in a call centre.

20:36To the kind of ravages of Old North. Some of the jobs that you were doing I spent years working in not a call centre, a telephone sales outfit, tele-sales outfit and so yeah there was this real sense of sort of drift and absolutely no sense of having any sort of career or anything like that. But life was sort of on the margins, those are menial jobs. So much of that experience has clearly fed into the books as well. Absolutely. The experiences of the characters that you write about. But it raises the question, if you had got a better degree at Oxford, maybe you wouldn't be writing literature, maybe you'd be doing a totally different kind of job.

21:16Yes, I'd probably be sitting in a sort of lawyer's office in the city or something. You know, I wouldn't be sitting here having this fascinating discussion with you. So that's what I mean. I can't sort of demonstrate this, but I just have this feeling that that was one of these extraordinary forks in the road, this decision to study this course rather than that course which had sort of incalculable consequences so when you're doing these jobs which i mean from one job to another were you thinking this is experience which will feed into i can create characters from these people that i see around me or did you start writing because it was the only way out at that moment well both really um writing my first novel was about telephone sales when it's called london in the southeast it obviously drew very directly on my years in that world.

22:06I tried to write about that world several times unsuccessfully and it really clicked when I stopped trying to put myself at the centre of it, I guess. The first few attempts to write about it, I think I sort of, at the centre of the story was some character vaguely like me. But then when I, instead of putting myself at the centre of it, I put another character, a sort of career salesman, older than me. Based on somebody you worked with? Based on a number of people I worked with. It was a sort of composite character, but very much taken from my experience of that world and working there for some years.

22:42Suddenly that, it kind of unlocked the whole thing and also approaching it as a comedy, very deliberately and explicitly. Those years of working, doing that kind of rather grubby job, gave me this novel. So they were the entry to that in a way. And gave you a sort of authorial approach, because in all of the books you're writing very much about other people. Now, I know all novelists write about other people, but very often there is an autobiographical element. No, no, sure. Are there any other characters, do you think, in your books which are kind of more closely aligned to your own life and experience?

23:17Some of the characters in All That Man Is. One of the characters in All That Man Is, for instance, is an academic specialising in sort of Anglo-Saxon and sort of old Germanic and stuff, and he's a sort of version of what I might have become if I'd actually liked that stuff and got it first. But yeah, I think with London and the South East, it did sort of set a pattern, you're right, where I sort of would write about someone who very obviously wasn't me, someone whose whole life was very different from my own. And also I was sort of drawn to the banal grubbiness of it. And I think that that has also set a pattern of some kind.

24:01Your next choice, David, are the films of New Hollywood, the American films of the early 1970s made by a new wave of young writers and directors. Which films in particular are you thinking of? Well, I mean, I love that period of cinema very much. I think that, obviously, there are certain films from that period that everybody knows, the Godfather films, Taxi Driver, maybe The Deer Hunter, and, of course, I love those films myself. but the reason I particularly love this era is that it's also the sort of slightly secondary works that really speak to me. A film like The Candidate, for instance, or Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye or The Last Detail, which is a sort of lesser-known Jack Nicholson film from the 70s, Downhill Racer, which is, the script is written by James Salter and Robert Redford is in it, but it's a very, not a particularly well-known film now, but it has this sort of very much the atmosphere of films of the period.

25:00Yeah, you ski fast, but you're reckless. You never had any real education, did you? All you ever had was your skis. And that's not enough. And I mentioned that these are films made by new young directors and writers. Was it the dialogue in particular that attracted you, do you think? I think it's the kind of extreme naturalism that attracts me about these films. It's just the sort of texture of reality that they have, which, you know, I don't find that in films either before or since. Particularly American films, which is what makes them stand out so much. They're so very different from the sort of Hollywood films of any other era, either before or since, as I say.

25:47So it's this very, you know, they tend to be shot in real locations. the actors, even the stars, kind of look more like real, normal people than you're used to seeing nowadays. Or, as I say, before, it wasn't just that it's only since then that things were different before as well, in the sort of 50s, 60s. There's a blunt, unvarnished realism to so much of your fiction. Yes, exactly. A pared-back naturalism, especially in flesh. Again, you can trace that back probably to that extreme naturalism. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But it's not... For me, it's somewhat different. I mean, a director like Ken Loach, for example, has a similar kind of naturalism.

26:30But the naturalism in his films has a sort of explicitly social and political purpose. Now, in a lot of these sort of 1970s, new Hollywood American films, that is there, but it's somehow not the main thing. There's a sort of sense of the beauty of reality, I'd almost say these films have a kind of for me anyway these films have a sort of beauty and a sort of fascination because of the naturalism which goes beyond any sort of social or political meaning that they might have and it's that that I love about them the most. And what did that teach you about writing? Well it's not that it taught me anything really I mean it just it identified something for me perhaps would be a better way of putting it it it identified something that I responded to as beauty, even though in many ways it's not conventionally beautiful.

27:25And it's the beauty of just the intense feeling of reality that you get from it. And of course, it's heightened. It's a sort of, it's a heightened version of just being alive. It's the same, but somehow more. And I think that that is very important for me as a writer, because I do strive as a writer to capture something of that and i think i always have i mean even in even in my earlier books that was very important to me that taxi driver's been staring at us you're talking to me well who the hell else are you talking talking to me well i'm the only one here i don't believe i've ever met anyone quite like you many of the the new hollywood films contain a certain view of masculinity as well.

28:15I mean, what it means to be a man with an emphasis on sex and violence and money, a theme that many of your books share as well. Yeah, I guess so. Yes. There's a sort of emotional and psychological realism in those films as well as being a kind of social and sort of visual realism. Absolutely. They sort of avoid obvious sort of happy resolution endings. They don't sort of sidestep the more difficult sort of transient difficulties of life. Yeah, the difficulties of being a man, the struggles of masculinity, the sort of inarticulate nature of many of you, well, your protagonist, particularly in flesh, Istvan.

28:56The word okay appears, I think it's 500 times in the book, and that is the response that Istvan gives to virtually every question. A single white mass which the doctor smooths and moulds. I'm okay, Istvan says. What do you do, the doctor asks, if you don't mind my asking. No, Istvan says, I don't mind. I was in the army. OK, the doctor says, his primary focus still on what he's doing. Until a few months ago. And now, the doctor asks, not sure, Istvan says. It is a third-person narrative, and we see the world through his rather unsophisticated eyes. Talk me through the stylistic decisions that created Flesh.

29:37Yeah, I mean, the stylistic aspect, the style of the novel is kind of part of the characterization, I guess, of Istvan himself. It's an expression of who he is to some extent. So that's certainly there. I wanted, though, to write... I mean, one of the things that was very important to me when I set out with this book, I suppose, was writing about life as a physical experience. Not only a physical experience, but sort of first and foremost. And I think that, I guess, is reflected in the style too. I mean, it's not a book which is given to sort of analysis, reflection. It very often deals with the physical surfaces of things.