David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for fiction for his novel Flesh. The British-Hungarian writer, 51, prevailed over five other finalists to take the annual award for the best English-language novel published in the UK or Ireland. The prize carries £50,000 and is widely seen as a major boost to a book’s sales and profile.
Flesh is written in spare prose and follows a taciturn, working-class Hungarian across decades. The narrative moves from a youthful relationship with an older woman to the difficulties of life as an immigrant in Britain and later to employment among the ultra-wealthy in London, tracing how formative experiences shape a life. When the book was longlisted, Szalay said he wanted to write “a book with a Hungarian end and an English end,” reflecting his own life between the two countries and the cultural and economic divides of contemporary Europe.
The judging panel was chaired by former Booker winner Roddy Doyle and included actor Sarah Jessica Parker and Nigerian novelist Ayobami Adebayo. In announcing the winner, the panel described Flesh as “a meditation on class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity,” and “a compelling portrait of one man, and the formative experiences that can reverberate across a lifetime.” Doyle added that they had “never read anything quite like it,” praising Szalay’s use of white space, which he said invites readers to observe and help shape the character.
Szalay was born in Canada, raised in the UK and now lives in Vienna. Flesh is his sixth work of fiction; he was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2016 for All That Man Is, a linked series about nine very different men.
This year’s other Booker finalists were Andrew Miller (The Land in Winter), Kiran Desai (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny), Susan Choi (Flashlight), Katie Kitamura (Audition) and Ben Markovits (The Rest of Our Lives).
The 2025 International Booker Prize, awarded to a work translated into English, went to Indian author Banu Mushtaq for Heart Lamp and her translator Deepa Bhasthi; the international prize is split equally between author and translator.
Edited by: Saim Dušan Inayatullah