Man, Woman, Other: Does writing have a gender?

David Szalay’s 2025 Booker Prize win caused a stir and ignited heated debate. For years, literary fiction had been excavating what it means to be a woman when Szalay shifted the conversation with Flesh, a novel about masculinity, “its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes”, according to the Guardian. In his acceptance speech, Szalay talked about the risks – formal, aesthetic and moral – that he took with Flesh and the inherently risky nature of fiction. With a little help from Coleridge (“a great mind must be androgynous”) and Virginia Woolf (“if one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her”), Sofia Nikolaidou joins David Szalay to discuss whether writing has a gender, but also talk about power, class, and immigration, major themes that recur throughout his work. You can expect a wide-ranging discussion about deafening narrative silences, the economic and cultural contradictions of modern Europe, and the books, people and stories that make us think.