LONDON, Nov. 12 -- Canadian-Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for "Flesh", the story of one man's life from working-class origins in Hungary to mega-wealth in Britain, 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 of Britain and Indian author Kiran Desai, to take the coveted literary award, which brings a £50,000 ($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's book recounts in spare, unadorned style the life of taciturn Istvan, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as a struggling immigrant in Britain to unlikely denizen of London high society. Szalay said he wrote "Flesh" under pressure, after abandoning a novel he'd been working on for four years. He said the story grew from "simple, fundamental ingredients". He knew he "wanted a book that was partly Hungarian and partly English" and was about "life as a physical experience." Accepting his trophy at London's Old Billingsgate - a former fish market turned glitzy events venue - Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his "risky" novel. He recalled asking his editor "whether she could imagine a novel called 'Flesh' winning the Booker Prize." "You have your answer," he said. Doyle, who chaired the judges, said Istvan belongs to a group overlooked in fiction: a working-class man. He said that since reading it, he looks more closely when he walks past bouncers standing in the doorways of Dublin pubs. "I'm kind of giving him a second look, because I feel I might know him a bit better," said Doyle, whose funny, poignant stories of working-class Dublin life won him the 1993 Booker Prize for "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha". Szalay, who was born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, raised in the UK and now lives in Vienna, was previously a Booker finalist in 2016 for "All That Man Is", a series of stories about nine wildly different men....