Hungarian-British author David Szalay has been announced as the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh. The £50,000 (Rs 58.4 lakhs approx) award was presented at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate, London, on Monday evening. Szalay’s sixth work of fiction was chosen unanimously by the judging panel, chaired by Roddy Doyle, the 1993 Booker winner. “We had never read anything quite like it,” Doyle said. “It is, in many ways, a dark book, but it is a joy to read.”
What is Flesh about?
Flesh is a thought-provoking novel that follows the life of István, a Hungarian man, from adolescence to middle age. The story begins with 15-year-old István, who lives with his mother in a Hungarian town. Struggling to fit in at school, he becomes isolated but finds comfort in an unexpected friendship with a married neighbour. What begins as a bond turns into a complicated relationship that changes his life. As István grows older, he is drawn into the turbulent waves of modern life, from military service to mingling with London’s wealthy elite. His journey shows human desires, love, ambition, success, and self-destruction, which a person experiences universally.
Szalay shows the story of a man caught between his hunger for connection and the forces of greed and power that shape his destiny.
The novel, written in Szalay’s trademark minimalist style, asks deep questions about what drives a person’s life and what ultimately breaks it.
What gained praise for the novel?
The Booker judges described Flesh as a ‘spare but propulsive’ story that offers an intimate look at a kind of man rarely explored in literature. “It presents us with a certain type of man and invites us to look behind the face,” said Doyle.
Writer and judge Sarah Jessica Parker praised the book’s emotional depth, while Doyle added that the story’s depiction of masculinity, particularly a man who struggles to express emotion, felt “real and powerful.”
In his review for The Guardian, author Keiran Goddard wrote, “Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question which is about the numbing strangeness of being alive. Szalay has always been a master of the flinty, spare sentence, but here he has pared things back even more brutally.”
Who is David Szalay?
David Szalay is the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. Born in Montreal, Canada, to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, he grew up in London and has lived in Lebanon, Hungary, and now Vienna.
After graduating from Oxford University, Szalay briefly worked in financial advertising, an experience that inspired his debut novel London and the South-East (2008), which won both the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes.
He later gained international recognition for All That Man Is (2016), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Gordon Burn Prize and the Plimpton Prize for Fiction. His 2019 short story collection Turbulence won the Edge Hill Prize.
Over the years, Szalay’s works have been translated into more than 20 languages, and he has also written several dramas for BBC Radio. In 2010, he was named one of The Telegraph’s top 20 British writers under 40, and in 2013, Granta included him in its list of Best of Young British Novelists.
The 2025 Booker shortlist
Szalay’s Flesh won over a strong shortlist that included several acclaimed authors. The favourites this year were Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since winning the Booker in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. Other shortlisted works were Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, and Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives.
Although the competition was tough, Doyle said the decision to award Szalay was “unanimous.” When asked if any other book came close, he replied, “Kinda yes, but it would be unfair to say which.”
Szalay joins list of Booker Prize winners
With Flesh, David Szalay joins the list of Booker Prize winners who explore human emotions and modern life in a powerful way. His win also continues Hungary’s literary legacy, following László Krasznahorkai, who won the International Booker Prize in 2015 and the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Szalay’s victory is being seen not just as recognition of his writing talent but also as a celebration of stories that highlight the quiet struggles of ordinary people. As jury chair Roddy Doyle said, Flesh focuses on “a working-class man who doesn’t usually get much attention and makes us feel for him deeply.”
Hence, Flesh stands out as a novel that does more than tell a story.
