David Szalay

David Szalay (born 1974 in Montreal, Quebec) is an English writer.
He was born in Canada, moved to the UK the following year and has lived there ever since. He studied at Oxford University and has written a number of radio dramas for the BBC. He won the Betty Trask Award for his first novel, London and the South-East, along with the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Since then he has written two other novels: Innocent (2009) and Spring (2011). He has also recently been named one of The Telegraph's Top 20 British Writers Under 40 and has also made it onto Granta magazine's 2013 list of the Best of Young British Novelists. A linked collection of short stories, All That Man Is, was short listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and won the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize. The Spectator said "Nobody captures the super-sadness of modern Europe as well as Szalay." The Observer asked if it was really a novel: "does it in any sense work, as Jonathan Cape wants us to believe, as a novel? Yes, there’s a thematic consistency that makes this more than a collection, and Szalay even throws in the odd narrative link (the 73-year-old, it transpires, is the 17-year-old’s granddad). But still, a novel? I don’t think so." It was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.