The New Statesman.

I'm Nicholas Harris and this is The New Statesman podcast.

And today we bring you a conversation I had earlier this week with David Salloy, the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize.

Congratulations, David. Thank you.

So I'm not sure how much time you've had to read the comment pages of the board sheets in the last 24 hours.

People are summarizing this novel, Flesh. They're calling it a book about masculinity. In fact, they're heralding it as a book about masculinity. Now that's quite a thin summary, and if I can have another run of it for our listeners, Flesh is the story of various episodes in the life of Ishtfan. When we first meet him, he's a 15-year-old Hungarian boy, and he's having an affair with a neighbour in his tower block in her early 40s. And then his life takes a turn when, in an altercation with her husband on the stairwell of the blocker flats, the husband is killed. And this leads Ishtlan to a young offender's institution, to the Hungarian army, to serving in Iraq, to emigrating to England, ultimately becoming a security

guard for London's super rich before he joins the ranks of the super rich himself. But you did say,

in one of your earlier interviews, you wanted to be as honest as possible about what it's like

to be a male body in the world in this novel. What is it like to be a male body in the world?

I mean, yes, there has been a lot of talk about the sort of masculinity aspects of this book in the response to it generally, and particularly

in the last day or two, maybe. I myself don't see it even primarily as a book about masculinity

per se. I want to slightly push back against that. I think that although masculinity is undoubtedly

part of what this book is about, any novel with a male protagonist is bound to be about masculinity

to some extent. And this book has that aspect to it. I think it's also about a lot of other

things and some of the other things that's about, I think, are more primary to the book itself.

So, when I'm happy to talk about masculinity, I hope we can also discuss other aspects of it.

I mean, to refine that slightly, to describe book to listeners, it's a book of mainly quite short sentences, quite spare prose,

but there are a couple of moments when I can

sort of tell you've like lent into it and you get these quite long, long paragraph sentences

where you feel like you're sort of saying something as well. And there is a comment towards

the end about puberty and it's Ishtvan reflecting on his adolescence and the bit of his adolescence that we've seen is this early affair with the neighbour.

Do you think that that is the key event of his life?

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