David Malouf, the acclaimed Australian author of books including Ransom, An Imaginary Life and the Booker prize-nominated Remembering Babylon, has died aged 92.

Malouf died on Wednesday, his publisher, Penguin Random House Australia, said in a statement on Thursday.

“We are deeply saddened to share that author and poet David Malouf AO has passed away,” the statement said. “David Malouf wrote across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, libretti and plays, and made a significant and continued impact on Australian literature.”

“David won numerous prizes for his work, including the Miles Franklin Award, Commonwealth Writers’ prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and Australia-Asia Literary Award. He was also an admired teacher and lecturer both in Australia and Europe.”

“Alongside his achievements as a writer, David was a loyal, loving friend to many and devoted to his family. He was a passionate supporter of Opera Australia, Adelaide Writers Week and the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.”

Born in Brisbane in 1934 to a Lebanese Australian father and an English-born mother of Portuguese and Sephardic Jewish descent, Malouf was an avid reader at an early age, reading the complete works of Shakespeare from the age of 10.

Malouf began writing poetry, usually about his childhood, his family, travelling and his connections to Europe and Australia; his first work was published in 1962. He was also known as a gifted short story writer, publishing five collections over three decades.

His first novel, 1975’s Johnno, was semi-autobiographical, following a young man growing up in Brisbane during the second world war.

His 1993 book, Remembering Babylon, made him a literary name: the tale of a young shipwreck survivor rescued and raised by Aboriginal people was shortlisted for the Booker prize. It also won the Commonwealth writers’ prize and the first International Dublin Literary award.

Much of Malouf’s writing focused on the past – his own childhood, on great myths, on colonial Australia.

“He has a poet’s sensibility, but there is nothing brazenly poetic about his prose,” Rick Gekoski wrote in the Guardian in 2011.

“One is constantly astonished by the vivacity and accuracy of the writing, and it is hardly possible to read a page of Malouf without a smile of delight and gratitude.”

Malouf’s final novel, Ransom, was published in 2009, after a 13-year gap between novels. The book, a retelling of Priam’s appeal to Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body in the Iliad, received acclaim around the world and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary award. Malouf’s final published book was a volume of poetry, An Open Book (2018).

Malouf was also a fan of opera, sitting on the board of Opera Australia and writing criticism and several libretti himself, including an adaptation of Patrick White’s Voss.

The author was gay, and openly so for much of his life, but remained discreet in his relationships before and after fame arrived; close friends reported not knowing anything about his personal life.

He was often hailed by critics and other authors as a great chronicler of Australia, uniquely capturing something of its innate character, which he rejected.

“I don’t consider myself a representative Australian and I’m not a representative Queenslander,” he once said.

“I think each one of us is individual and we take exactly what suits us best. Whether we’re men, women, gay or ethnic, we take up what we can use. I think that’s one of the great privileges of being Australians. We have that kind of freedom and we’ve given up, I hope, the very narrow idea we have to think of ourselves as Australians. We can be whatever we want to be.”

Acclaimed Australian author Helen Garner said she would remember Malouf for his kindness, encouragement and love of laughter.

“David gave me a great deal of encouragement when I was starting out,” Garner said.

“He knew how to be useful when he saw a friend going down for the third time in a mess of her own making: his kindness in a crisis was imaginative and very practical. He was witty and he loved to laugh. In recent years our lives changed direction and we drifted apart. Foolishly, I imagined he would live on for ever in his high apartment up there in Surfers (Paradise). I’m shocked and sad to hear that he’s gone.”

It’s the question most often posed to artists: where do you get your ideas from? David Haig’s answer is: I ask Google. Preserve the mystique, man! Haig is celebrated both as an actor (Killing Eve, The Thin Blue Line) and playwright, whose 2004 hit My Boy Jack was adapted for TV and whose follow-up Pressure is now a forthcoming Hollywood movie. His mouthwatering latest play dramatises the friendship between writer and spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle and escapologist and rationalist Harry Houdini. It’s such a fascinating double act, one assumes Haig must have long nursed an interest in their story. The truth is more prosaic. “I mundanely Googled ‘interesting unusual relationships in British history’,” he tells me. “And that’s what came up.”

Should we admire the man’s honesty (What do you think of AI Overviews? “It’s unavoidably useful”) or deplore his lack of romance? Not coincidentally, these are the same questions raised by Magic, opening in Chichester this month, and probing the friendship-then-friction between Conan Doyle, convinced he can communicate with the dead, and Houdini, unsentimentally calling a fraud a fraud. “For these two dissimilar men to meld together when they meet, it was like a chemical bonding, then to find this critical element that tests and challenges their relationship, I thought that was absolutely fascinating.”

Magic – whose production, by director Lucy Bailey, promises gasp-inducing illusions alongside the drama – stages the pair’s coming together then splitting apart, as Conan Doyle and his wife Jean seek contact with his son Kingsley, killed in the first world war, through the spirit medium Mina Crandon – and Houdini assembles “an army of debunkers” to expose Crandon’s fakery. “Having gone to so many seances himself, pursuing the spirit of his own mother, [Houdini] became viscerally angry and perceived them as abuse of the grieving,” says Haig.

You might expect modern audiences to be wholly on Houdini’s side. But Conan Doyle will be played by Haig himself, who as an actor has won the nation’s heart with all his buttoned-up bureaucrats and establishment Englishmen struggling to keep their upper lip stiff. It’s crucial, he tells me, that audiences sympathise with Conan Doyle, and don’t see his faith as an object of ridicule. “He was seeking a religion that was scientifically based. At the time, it was thought that electromagnetism might absolutely be a means to contact the spirits of the dead. That may now seem ludicrous, but the energy of Conan Doyle’s optimism was always engaging. Hopefully there are lots of laughs in the play, but one of the great challenges is to ensure that element is not played as comedy.”

What interests Haig, in a play he says is all about ambivalences, is that both characters had mixed feelings about their own fame: “Houdini wanted not to be an entertainer but a great writer – like Conan Doyle.” And Conan Doyle felt his most beloved creation, Sherlock Holmes, to be far beneath him: “He was like a great Shakespearean actor trapped in a sitcom all his life.” There’s ambivalence too – hence the show’s title – about the distinctions between faith and fakery. “That’s another theme of the play: how do you define the word ‘magic’? What do you mean by it? Is a spiritual faith a form of magic? Or does it require deception and fakery to be magic?”

Haig approaches all this material, he tells me, from a position of lifelong rationalism. Not for him any sentimentality about how writers get their ideas for plays. “Unless you feel this deep calling to write about something specific,” he says, in defence of his Googling, “you need a little bit of help along the way!

“In Magic, I am playing someone with profound faith, and yet if an atheist can be a profound atheist – well, that’s me. And yet, when people are at their most certain, they’re also suspect, aren’t they?” His grandmother attended “a huge number” of seances, he says – but he has attended none. “I would go to one; I’d be fascinated. But I haven’t, I don’t know why.” But there is in his work an enduring interest in bereavement and the lingering presence of the dead. My Boy Jack was likewise about a son killed in the first world war, a coincidence Haig seems surprised to hear me point out – and which he ascribes in part to the death of his own sister at the age of 22.

That was 44 years ago; Haig is 70 now and contemplating if not mortality then at least redundancy. “I think this may be [my last play],” he tells me, if uncertainly. “How long do you go on for? How secure is it as you move through your 70s? You think of McKellen and Dame Judi Dench, still faultless as performers. But that’s not the case for everyone. So I just don’t know where it’s going to head yet.” But if it were all to stop now, Haig would look back on a satisfyingly distinctive career, the master of not one theatre-making craft, but two. “I would be very, very reassured,” he pronounces, with characteristic English understatement, “that things have, on the whole, been fulfilling.”

My earliest reading memory
Memories from my childhood are opening up as I read to my own young children at the moment. Something in the pictures of Helen Cooper’s The Bear Under the Stairs or Lane Smith’s The Big Pets takes me back to being four years old and being read to.

My favourite book growing up
I love the Sabriel series by Garth Nix and first read it alongside my father and, later, my younger brother. It was truly a shared joy to be immersed in that world, for a book to give us a new connection to one another.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I don’t remember what age I was when I found The Bone People by Keri Hulme on my parents’ bookshelf, probably too young. I was a swirling hurricane of a teenager and reading about Kerewin alone in her tower felt momentous. There was something about the way that the anger and fear in the book bury into the writing.

The writer who changed my mind
I think my mind is being changed by writing all of the time, but most recently Ed Yong’s book about animal senses, An Immense World, completely changed my perspective on the world around us. Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad is one of the books about the genocide of the Palestinian people that has started to educate me. Women Talking by Miriam Toews showed me what fiction could be capable of.

The book that made me want to be a writer
It probably happened slowly, without my really realising. I think the Alfie books by Shirley Hughes were a beginning – the beautiful domesticity, the pacing. The first time I actually remember having that envious buzzing feeling of “What if I could do this?” was probably with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg.

The book or author I came back to
In a previous interview I said I was not a fan of David Szalay, but I think that Flesh is a masterpiece.

The book I reread
I reread all of the time. Both as a reader, for love, and as a writer. There is such delight in finding new things, in the writing, in yourself. Both Orlando and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf are books I first read as a literature student and have returned to later and again, very recently.

The book I could never read again
I wish I never had to read Dr Seuss’s The Lorax again; where can I hide it?

The book I discovered later in life
I have only recently picked up A Room With a View by EM Forster, after loving Lucy Honeychurch in the film, and it is so wonderful and funny. I have also just started reading the work of Yōko Ogawa, a brilliant writer.

The book I am currently reading

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson – and I’m listening to The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell.

My comfort read
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.

I’m not what you might consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic. The novel’s reputation precedes it as a book infamously few ever finish, and those who do tend to belong to a particular breed of college-age guys who talk over you, a sect of pedantic, misunderstood young men for whom, over the course of 30 years, Infinite Jest has become a rite of passage, much as Little Women or Pride and Prejudice might function for aspiring literary young women.

Most readers come to the novel in their formative years, but I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t until the winter of 2023 that, at the age of 34, smoking outside a party in Brooklyn, I found myself suddenly motivated to embark on the two-pound tome. A boy I knew from high school brought it up, and as I happened at the time to have developed a casual interest in those works one might attribute to the “lit-bro” canon (Bret Easton Ellis, Hemingway, etc), it seemed the appropriate time to take it on.

It’s difficult to pin down what exactly constitutes this canon beyond the readership that tends to gravitate toward it, and by extension the readership it repels, but its defining feature seems to be the centering of male loneliness. A male protagonist, isolated and misunderstood, stands at odds with social norms and expectations and either grapples internally to critique them or identifies the source of ideology and seeks violent revenge against it. The spaces these works operate in are largely male-dominated – war zones, finance offices, fight clubs. They are largely accessible on a stylistic level and deeply familiar on a psychological one and, as such, have proven popular mainstream fare – massive bestsellers, ripe for adaptation, often critically championed besides. In recent years, the backlash against such success, carried out online and in other public discourse, and the backlash against that backlash have done as much as any single intrinsic commonality to create the perception of similitude throughout the canon.

My guess is I became interested in this genre because I wanted to see for myself what exactly this community of young men was attracted to. And so I purchased a copy of Infinite Jest at the start of the new year. I aimed to read 50 pages a day. Some days 50 pages felt breezy, cinematic, riveting; other days they felt like a slog. Though neither the Enfield Tennis Academy nor the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is an inherently male-dominated space, the majority of the characters are men, all of them, of course, completely levelled by loneliness, but in terms of pace and accessibility, the novel stands starkly apart from the genre with which I had come to associate it.

For one thing, reading is often interrupted by endnotes, of which there are 388 in tiny 8pt font. They range in complexity and salience from a one-word translation of the Québécois word for wheelchair to a nine-page inventory of a fictional film director’s collection of archival footage.

“The endnotes are very intentional and they’re in there for certain structural reasons … It’s almost like having a second voice in your head,” Wallace said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 1997. He hesitates to go into more detail lest he appear pretentious, until Rose wheedles him to “quit worrying about how you’re gonna look and just be”.

In interviews Wallace often comes across as a kind of Charlie Kaufman protagonist. Isolated by his own intelligence, longing for connection, neurotic but vulnerable, gently well-spoken, often apologising for roundabout answers that nonetheless exhibit great clarity or calling out his own tendency to sweat before someone else can beat him to the chase. “There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality is fractured,” Foster Wallace continues. “The difficulty about writing about that reality is that text is very linear, it’s very unified. I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting.”

“One of the things I was trying to do in this book was have something be long and difficult but have it be fun enough that somebody would be almost seduced into doing the work.”

Contrast, for example, the novel’s opening scene, which reads with the orgasmic intensity of a teen movie on hallucinogenics, with one some 80 pages later, a meeting between a Québécois separatist agent and a government operative set against a backdrop of Arizona shale. What appears to be a lesser endnote, a backstory concerning one of the agent’s superiors is itself twice noted, leading to an eight-page history of the separatist movement in question, narrated in and out of free indirect discourse, in the form of a semi-plagiarised term paper, which of course contains its own notes, one of which, most infuriatingly, requires us to turn an additional eight pages just to connect pimple cream to its chemical formula.

A bathos of almost absurd proportions, but cumulatively, all of Infinite Jest’s digressions and pages of impenetrable density test the reader’s attention, conjuring the very irritations and panics and highs and plateaux that Wallace describes at length in the minds of his characters, and then, after long spells of banal tediousness, compensate the diligent with some excruciating, unfathomable detail plucked from the secret interior of a flawed human being pulsing with life. If you allow yourself to trust-fall into the barbed intricacies of the writing, you will discover soft, exquisite humanity as its perennial landing.

These many valences of density are part of a larger meditation on life and art in the age of entertainment. For gen X, that mostly meant television, under the hegemony of which they came of age, when concerns about the death of the novel and the idea that fiction’s time had passed felt truly pressing.

It is tempting to see Infinite Jest as one final act of heroism in the name of fiction. Certainly, I think it’s no stretch to say it’s unlikely we’ll see another book like this in our lifetimes. Ten years from now, Infinite Jest may exist as an artefact of an era when humans still wrote, from a writer who could describe the weather with detail as compelling as the realists, a work that combines Shakespearean lexical boldness with literary brat-pack druggie precocious cool and mainstream momentum to create one of the enduring literary successes of the 20th century.

When I was approached to celebrate the novel’s 30th anniversary edition, it was perhaps hoped that I might assist in assuaging the unfair, outsized connotations of what it means to be a David Foster Wallace reader, which, at its worst, has come to signify misogyny, and at its best, someone who’s just slightly annoying.

When I emerged from those weeks of dedicated reading I had a feeling of intensified mental acuity, but more importantly, there was the sensation of grief. It was a type of mourning I had not experienced before, one contingent on the fact that this book had demanded so much of my attention for so long a time. I missed these characters. I had lived with Hal, Joelle, Orin, Stice, Pemulis, and meaty, square-head, heart-of-gold Don Gately, witness to their deformities and obsessions so meticulously detailed and made so alive on the page, and suddenly without them I felt hollow. And just as with real grief, I found myself wanting to be surrounded by fellow mourners, to seek them out and convene in our collective memory, people who I realised were defined by a set of attributes wholly different from those I had assumed, people who had committed an act of defiance and tenacity, curiosity and rigour, and after it all, were sad to see its end.

David Walliams has been dropped from the Waterstones Children’s book festival following allegations of inappropriate behaviour. The decision comes days after his publisher, HarperCollins, cut ties with the author. Walliams has denied the allegations.

Walliams was set to appear at the Dundee leg of the festival on February 7. He has now been removed from the list of speakers on the festival’s website. A spokesperson for Waterstones told the Guardian: “HarperCollins have confirmed that David Walliams will no longer be appearing at our festival in Dundee.”

HarperCollins dropped Walliams after an investigation into allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards young women, the Telegraph reported on Friday. According to the newspaper, he was the subject of complaints that he had “harassed” junior female staff at HarperCollins UK. One woman who raised concerns is understood to have left the company after reaching a settlement that included a five-figure payout. After the investigation, the publisher decided it would no longer release new titles by the author.

A spokesperson for Walliams said that he had “never been informed of any allegations raised against him” by HarperCollins. “He was not party to any investigation or given any opportunity to answer questions. David strongly denies that he has behaved inappropriately and is taking legal advice.”

In a statement to the Guardian on Friday, HarperCollins said: “After careful consideration, and under the leadership of its new CEO, HarperCollins UK has decided not to publish any new titles by David Walliams.”

The news comes as Walliams is scheduled to appear on a festive special of the comedy panel show Would I Lie to You? on Boxing Day on BBC One. The episode attracted controversy earlier this year after it emerged that he had made two Nazi salutes during the recording. At the time, the BBC apologised to those present. A spokesperson for Banijay UK, which owns Would I Lie To You? producer Zeppotron, said it was “immediately acknowledged during the recording that this segment would not be broadcast under any circumstances.”

After last week’s allegations about Walliams, a spokesperson told BBC reporters: “While we’re not making any changes to the festive schedules, we have no future projects directly involving David Walliams.”

Two of Walliams’ books, Mr Stink and The Boy in the Dress, have been adapted for television and were broadcast on CBBC on Sunday.

Quick Guide

Contact us about this story

Show

The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know.

If you have something to share on this subject, you can contact us confidentially using the following methods.

Secure Messaging in the Guardian app

The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said.

If you don’t already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu. Select ‘Secure Messaging’.

SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post

If you can safely use the Tor network without being observed or monitored, you can send messages and documents to the Guardian via our SecureDrop platform.

Finally, our guide at theguardian.com/tips lists several ways to contact us securely, and discusses the pros and cons of each. 

Illustration: Guardian Design / Rich Cousins

David Walliams has been dropped by his publisher after an investigation into allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards young women, the Telegraph has reported.

Walliams, one of Britain’s most successful children’s authors, was reportedly the subject of complaints that he had “harassed” junior female staff at HarperCollins UK, prompting the publisher to decide it would no longer release new titles by the author.

One woman who raised concerns is understood to have left the company after reaching a settlement that included a five-figure payout.

HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, reportedly carried out an internal inquiry after a junior employee made a complaint in 2023. Sources cited by the Telegraph said that, after the inquiry, steps were taken to limit contact between Walliams and some employees. Measures reportedly included ensuring some staff did not work directly with him, advising them to attend meetings in pairs and discouraging visits to his home.

The decision to sever ties came after HarperCollins’ former chief executive, Charlie Redmayne, suddenly stepped down in October and was replaced on an interim basis by Kate Elton.

In a statement to the Guardian, a HarperCollins spokesperson said: “After careful consideration, and under the leadership of its new CEO, HarperCollins UK has decided not to publish any new titles by David Walliams.”

Walliams has “strongly” denied the publisher’s allegations, with a spokesperson saying: “David has never been informed of any allegations raised against him by HarperCollins.

“He was not party to any investigation or given any opportunity to answer questions. David strongly denies that he has behaved inappropriately and is taking legal advice.”

Walliams rose to prominence in the early 2000s as the co-creator and star of BBC’s Little Britain, which became a cultural phenomenon and made him one of the most recognisable comedians in the UK. He later became a familiar television personality through roles as a presenter and as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent. From 2008, Walliams reinvented himself as a children’s author, achieving huge commercial success. He has authored more than 40 books and short story collections – in 2019, it was estimated that he had sold £100m worth of books.

However, Walliams, 54, has come under fire in recent years. Critics have challenged aspects of his writing, including the use of stereotypes. In 2021, a story titled Brian Wong, Who Was Never, Ever Wrong, about a Chinese boy, was removed from Walliams’ book The World’s Worst Children.

Walliams left his role as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent in 2022 after 10 years, when the Guardian reported on a leaked transcript showing him making crude remarks about contestants during auditions in 2020. He referred to one contestant as a “cunt” and said “she thinks you want to fuck her, but you don’t”, about another. Walliams apologised for the comments.

A writing team led by the One Day author, David Nicholls, and that includes Caitlin Moran is bringing Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ to the small screen in a 10-part BBC One adaptation of the classic tale of teenage life in British suburbia.

Nicholls, who described the book as “a classic piece of comic writing and an incredible piece of ventriloquism on Sue Townsend’s part”, will adapt the book that produced one of the best-known literary creations of the 1980s.

Known for Mole’s comically dramatic assessments of his life in a Midlands cul-de-sac – “I feel like a character in a Russian novel half the time” – the book sold 20m copies worldwide and was translated into 30 languages.

The BBC said: “With only a multi-coloured ballpoint pen as his guide, Adrian worries about his spots, his parents’ divorce, the torment of first love and the fact he’s never seen a female nipple.”

None of the cast has been revealed, and producers say “a nationwide … search is currently underway to find Adrian”. Gian Sammarco starred in the Thames TV’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole in 1985, with Julie Walters playing Mole’s mother, Pauline.

The book was also adapted as a musical and a play, and a second TV series of based on Townsend’s follow-up novel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, was released in 1987.

Big Talk Studios, the production company behind Ludwig and The Outlaws, will produce the show for the BBC, while Nicholls will be joined in the writing room by Moran and her sister Caroline, Big Boy’s Jack Rooke, and Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor, the team behind Everyone Else Burns.

Despite Mole first appearing four decades ago, the character’s influence continues to be felt. Townsend, who died in 2014, said the character “wouldn’t be using Twitter to memorialise his life” in the age of social media because “his thoughts and diary were very much private”.

The BBC’s director of drama, Lindsay Salt, said: “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole is one of those rare, seminal stories that has captivated generation after generation.

“David Nicholls has brilliantly distilled the wit, warmth and quiet poignancy of Sue Townsend’s iconic novel, reminding us why Adrian’s voice remains as sharply relevant today as it was in the 1980s.

“Times may have changed, but the anxieties, ambitions and wonderfully awkward truths at the heart of Adrian’s world are utterly timeless.”

Hungarian-British author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker prize for his novel Flesh.

Szalay’s sixth work of fiction traces the life of one man, István, from his youth to midlife. The judges “had never read anything quite like it”, said panel chair Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993. “It is, in many ways, a dark book, but it is a joy to read.”

Flesh opens with a shocking incident that unfolds while teenage István is living in an apartment complex with his mother in Hungary. Szalay then follows the protagonist as he spends time in the military before moving to London, where he begins working for the uber-rich. Written in spare prose, the novel explores masculinity, class, migration, trauma, sex and power.

Szalay was announced as the winner of the £50,000 award at a ceremony held in Old Billingsgate in London on Monday evening. He was previously shortlisted for the prize in 2016, for his novel All That Man Is.

The decision to hand Szalay the award was “unanimous”, said Doyle. Joining him on this year’s panel was the actor Sarah Jessica Parker, along with the writers Chris Power, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and Kiley Reid.

The book “homes in on a working-class man, which ordinarily doesn’t get much of a look in”, said Doyle. “It presents us with a certain type of man” and “invites us to look behind the face.”

“Without anybody being consciously aware of it, I was reared, for example, never to cry,” Doyle said. “I became aware of that and decided it was nonsense,” but István is “that type of man”.

“Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive,” wrote Keiran Goddard in a Guardian review of the novel. “Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. Szalay has always been a master of the flinty, spare sentence but in this novel he has pared things back even more brutally.”

Szalay’s novel topped a strong shortlist which included bookies’ favourite Andrew Miller, with The Land in Winter, and Kiran Desai, nominated for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since winning the Booker with The Inheritance of Loss in 2006. The other novels shortlisted this year were Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, and Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives.

Asked whether any of the other novels had got close to challenging Szalay’s win, Doyle said “the answer is ‘kinda yes’,” but refused to name specific titles, saying it would be “unfair, a bit cruel”.

Born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, Szalay grew up in London. He has lived in Lebanon and the UK, and now lives in Vienna. After graduating from Oxford, he worked as a financial advertising sales executive, which became the inspiration for his debut novel, London and the South-East. He is also the author of the novels Spring and The Innocent, as well as the short story collection Turbulence.

Writing in the Guardian over the weekend on his inspiration for Flesh, Szalay said that the novel was “conceived in the shadow of failure” – in autumn 2020 he abandoned a novel he had been working on for nearly four years that he felt wasn’t working. He wanted Flesh to “somehow express the feeling I had that our existence is a physical experience before it is anything else, that all of its other aspects proceed from that physicality”.

His win marks the 10th for publisher Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin, which has the most wins in the history of the prize. Last year’s winning title, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, was also published by Cape.

Other recent winners include Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka and The Promise by Damon Galgut.

• Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Alan Hollinghurst has been awarded the 2025 David Cohen prize for literature, one of the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious literary honours, in recognition of his lifetime’s achievement in fiction.

The prize, worth £40,000, was announced on Tuesday evening in London by the chair of judges Hermione Lee. She described Hollinghurst as “one of the most daring, stylish, witty, humane and influential novelists writing in the English language today”.

Hollinghurst told the Guardian he was “overcome with emotion” on hearing of his win. “It has always, to my mind, been the most significant British literary prize.” The award, often described as the UK and Ireland’s Nobel in literature, is awarded biennially to a writer from either country for their entire body of work.

“It takes account of everything a writer has done, and the writers it has rewarded in the past have been huge inspirations,” he said. “I went nearly 30 years ago to the ceremony to see Muriel Spark receiving the award, and later Harold Pinter – these figures are godlike to me, and it’s extraordinary now to find myself joining that list.” Winning “feels to me like the greatest encouragement to keep going,” he added.

Hollinghurst, 71, is best known for his Booker prize-winning 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, a social and sexual panorama of Thatcher-era London that has been adapted into a stage production which opened last month at London’s Almeida theatre. His other works include The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1994), The Stranger’s Child (2011) and Our Evenings (2024). He was knighted for services to literature earlier this year.

Lee praised Hollinghurst’s “pioneering boldness and candour” in writing about gay lives and English identity over nearly four decades.

“In seven remarkable novels,” she said, “he has written about society, class and race, biography and memory, art and literature, childhood, love and friendship. He’s equally brilliant at creating gripping plots full of suspense, secrets and mysteries, and at moving personal stories of longing, joy, obsession and loss.”

Lee was joined on the judging panel by the novelist Tessa Hadley, poet Seán Hewitt, critic Maya Jaggi and biographer Ruth Scurr. Hadley said Hollinghurst “makes the reader see some solid thing – a room, a face, a landscape – with thrilling exactness”, while Hewitt praised his “vivid, elegant novels of gay English life that have changed the way we see ourselves”.

“From the start, I set out to write about gay life in England,” said Hollinghurst. “I just felt very lucky, in the 1980s, to have this whole fascinating field of social history and behaviour to explore in fiction, because it hadn’t really been done in this country before.”

His most recent novel, Our Evenings, was praised for its portrayal of a mixed-race narrator in contemporary Britain, a perspective Hollinghurst said he approached with care.

“It gave me pause,” he said. “I’d been wanting to write about racial discrimination for some time, but it was a question of how to look at it and find a way that was tactful and true.”

He added that he is working on a new novel, though he is “at a very early stage. I’ve always been horribly slow with formulation – about every seven years I produce something.”

As part of the David Cohen tradition, the winner also selects the recipient of the Clarissa Luard award, a £10,000 prize for emerging talent the winner wishes to support. Hollinghurst chose the Congolese-British playwright Benedict Lombe, whose play Shifters moved from the Bush theatre to the West End this year, earning her two Olivier nominations.

“Shifters was the best new play that I saw last year,” Hollinghurst said. “I saw it at the Bush theatre before it transferred, it was so remarkable. I long for her next play, and I thought she was an obvious person to give this award and encouragement to.”

“It’s an honour and a joy to have my work recognised and championed by such an accomplished – and exquisite – storyteller as Alan,” said Lombe. “At a time when many voices are being silenced and funding is being cut, this award is a precious thing indeed.”

First presented in 1993 and named after its founder, the David Cohen prize celebrates writers whose work has made a lasting contribution to British and Irish literature. Previous winners include Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel and Colm Tóibín.