The author of the 2025 Booker Prize-winning novel, Flesh, has been accused of plagiarising the plot of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1975 film, Barry Lyndon.
David Szalay’s Flesh, was acknowledged for it originality, with judges saying they had “never read anything quite like it”.
But some have now come out to say the work is perhaps not so unique, being reminiscent of Kubrick’s film, The Times reports.
Flesh is about a working-class Hungarian, István, who has a rags to riches to rags story. In Kubrick’s film, protagonist Barry Lyndon is from an impoverished background in Ireland.
Generally, both characters are soldiers who accumulate wealth, marry rich women, lose sons, and contend with mistrusting stepsons whose lives they consider taking and then eventually spare. At the end of both plots, the men are financially destroyed.
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Booker Prize winner David Szalay controversy
Szalay will reportedly defend the similarities in an upcoming episode of BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life.
In the episode, which airs on Thursday, he is asked whether the film is a “direct reference”, to which he replies: “No, I wouldn’t go that far.”
The author then adds that Kubrick “wasn’t really at the front of my mind, I don’t think”.
Szalay did concede that the film had made “quite a strong impression” on him, but denied it was a direct copy.
Kubrick wrote the script to his film, and died in 1999, meaning Barry Lyndon will still be in copyright, although William Thackeray’s novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, published in 1884, is not.
Singer Dua Lipa interviewed Szalay for her book club podcast in 2025, and according to The Times, he said of Flesh‘s influences:
“He cited Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf and Lord Jim by Conrad, but not Barry Lyndon.
“A month later he told The Observer that its rags-to-riches arc “was an influence”, while in an earlier interview with an academic journal, English Studies, he acknowledged the link with Thackeray’s novel more fully.
“[It] was an influence on elements of the plot, absolutely,” he said. “Sometimes these echoes initially creep in unconsciously, then you notice they’re there, and you like them and emphasise them further. That’s what happened with allusions to picaresque narratives in Flesh.”
Critic David Sexton said Szalay has simply been inspired by the film – which is why he’s confused by the author’s reaction.
The former literary editor of the Evening Standard told The Times: “I don’t understand why, at this stage, he will not own up to it more.
“I – and everybody else who has noticed it – haven’t found anything wrong in it. It is not plagiarism; it is completely legitimate to adapt something, and I have always admired his writing.”
Top image: Booker Prize winner, David Szalay. Image: Instagram