Articles by Peter Handke

World

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 a narrative of displacement, masculinity, and the weight of moral choices. A Hungarian teenager, Istvan, drifts through life — a physical relationship, an older woman, juvenile detention, the Iraq war, and finally a job as a driver for the extremely wealthy in London. Globalisation is not an abstract concept in Flesh — it is felt in the teeth. Some citizens are more equal than others. The novel probes spaces, however close to the bone, where human feeling survives — including in the face of mortality. “There’s still something there,” says a woman about her dying husband. On a train to see his mother, in a rare, poetic moment, Istvan glimpses the landscape of his youth: “Deer flee across flooded fields. In the distance are low hills the colour of smoke.” Coincidentally, this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was also awarded to a Hungarian writer — the 71-year old László Krasznahorkai — for his work which, in the words of the Swedish Academy, “in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. The small and land-locked nation of Hungary in Central Europe has produced some remarkable writers. The nation has also had a tumultuous history. After World War I, in the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary lost more than two-thirds of its territory and its people — compelling a turn to a past that has always seemed larger than the present. Questions of diversity and access remain Krasznahorkai’s university thesis was on the anti-fascist and anti-communist writer Sandor Marai, who left Hungary to live in exile. In the 1930s, Marai had been one of Hungary’s leading literary figures. In 1944, when the Nazis invaded, he decided to stop writing; and in 1948, when the Russians arrived, he left. Ironically, he died by suicide in 1989, the very year when Hungary began cutting through its barbed wire border with Austria — within months, bringing down the Iron Curtain in Europe. In a 2025 interview with novelist Hari Kunzru for The Yale Review, Krasznahorkai described art as “humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of lostness that is our fate”. If Hungary’s literary history reflects loss and renewal, Szalay brings these themes into a globalised, unequal world. Flesh explores themes of migration and human connection. Yet, the institutions that celebrate such writing invite their own scrutiny. Does literary prize culture build bridges in the wider community, or is it out of touch, perceived as elitist — culturally or economically — and restricted to a certain type of well-heeled reader? Whom does it include — and whom does it exclude? Literary culture reflects the ongoing tension between creative expression, access, and inequality. The Booker Prize website announces that it is the “leading literary award in the English-speaking world”. The longlist, shortlist, and award process have the power to transform writers’ careers with global audiences and surging book sales. Nevertheless, questions of diversity, readability, and gatekeeping persist. Literary prizes have their histories of omission and oversight. Tolstoy, who was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel, but never awarded, remarked that he would decline even if offered, for he believed money was the greatest source of evil. Writers like Chekhov, Proust, Borges, Woolf, and Premchand were overlooked. Sartre declined, unwilling to be institutionalised. More recently, in 2019, Austrian novelist Peter Handke — who denied the Bosnian genocide (1992-95) — was awarded the Nobel prize, provoking outrage. Training the imagination to care While the benefits of literary prizes are clear — sales, visibility, readership — we should look for more ways to achieve these outcomes. Organisers of literary events should also hold book discussions in local community spaces, universities, libraries, and parks, where a more diverse public can participate. Public libraries should offer these books, and conversations, to less privileged readers. Access can take the conversation beyond what can sometimes feel like self-congratulatory echo chambers. Another, larger question remains: when attention spans diminish and people are always scrolling, does the novel still matter? On my desk is a reminder why the answer is a clear ‘yes’. Since September, I have been re-reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, first published nearly 160 years ago. I have been reading on flights and trains, at bus stops, park benches, and cafes — and I am still reading it. It is, as the publishing world likes to say, unputdownable. It is alive, and contains multitudes. Not least of all, there is the question of how we read. The activity of reading a novel is a slow, thoughtful process. A novel is not a commodity to be “consumed” like a social media reel; it must be experienced reflectively, in an unhurried manner. When we read, we bring to the act of reading everything that makes us what we are — our contexts, personal experiences, and questions. Reading is personal, yes; but literary prizes help to sustain the conditions in which writers can produce books and readers can read them. Novels are one of the ways in which we can make sense of the world, and train the imagination to care. As Szalay reminds us, “Fiction can take risks — aesthetic, formal or even moral.” The writer is in the IAS.