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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.
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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.
