Canadian-Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “Flesh,” the story of an ordinary man’s life over several decades in which what isn’t on the page is just as important as what is.

Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including favourites Andrew Miller and Kiran Desai, to take the coveted literary award, which brings a 50,000-pound ($66,000) payday and a big boost to the winner’s sales and profile.

He was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that included Irish writer Roddy Doyle and “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker.

Doyle said “Flesh” — a book “about living, and the strangeness of living” — emerged as the judges’ unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.

Szalay, who was born in Canada, raised in the UK and lives in Vienna, was previously a Booker finalist in 2016 for “All That Man Is,” a series of stories about nine wildly different men.

The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and has established a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Its winners have included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who took the 2024 prize for space station story “Orbital."