Flesh by British-Hungarian author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker prize for fiction.
Szalay’s sixth novel, which follows the travails of an inscrutable Hungarian man over the decades, was unanimously chosen as the winner after a six-hour discussion, said Irish writer Roddy Doyle, chair of the Booker judging panel and previous recipient of the prestigious award.
“The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the rest of the other great novels was Flesh because of its singularity,” he said. “We had never read anything quite like it.”
Szalay, 51, was presented the prize by last year’s winner Samantha Harvey at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London on Monday night (10 November).
Accepting the award, Szalay said: “There was a sense of risk being taken, and I think it's very important that we did take these risks.
“Obviously, it's easy for me to say that now, but I think I felt that all along, because I think fiction can take risks. It can take aesthetic risk, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms, narrative forms, can't quite do at the same extent.”
Published in March, Flesh follows the monosyllabic István as he navigates awkward boyhood through to melancholic late-middle age. With its minimalist prose and impenetrable protagonist, the book is “hypnotic in its masculine blankness”, wrote The Independent’s Nick Duerden.
“Somehow in the absence of words – or the absence of István’s words – that allow us to know István,” said panel chair Doyle. “I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses white space on the page so well.”
The judges found Szalay’s novel “spare, disciplined, urgent, honest and heartbreaking”, added Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation.
Unlike in previous years, the 2025 shortlist this time featured zero debut novels, with only established authors making the cut.
Featured on the shortlist alongside Szalay were Kiran Desai (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny), Ben Markovits (The Rest of Our Lives), Susan Choi (Flashlight), Andrew Miller (The Land in Winter), and Katie Kitamura (Audition).
Flesh is Szalay’s sixth book, following London and the South-East (2008), The Innocent (2009), Spring (2011), All That Man Is (2016), and Turbulence (2018).
Szalay, who lives in Vienna, was previously shortlisted for All That Man Is, a collection of nine stories that explore the lives of different men across Europe. Like that novel, Flesh continues the author’s exploration of modern masculinity.
Speaking to The Independent earlier this year, Szalay said: “I am not writing for men exclusively and never have. Writing from a male perspective should never mean that you are writing just for men, and the same applies the other way around.”
Speaking at a press conference, Doyle said: “The book is about living and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading – experiencing – this extraordinary, singular novel.”
Szalay will receive £50,000 in prize money and a trophy named Iris, after the 1978 winner Iris Murdoch.
His triumph may, however, come as a surprise to many people. Prior to the ceremony, Miller’s The Land in Winter, a novel about marriage in 1960s England, had been the bookmakers’ favourite to win, followed by Indian author Desai – who previously won the Booker in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss.
Serving alongside Doyle on the judging panel are actor Sarah Jessica Parker as well as writers Chris Power, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, and Kiley Reid.
The Sex and the City star previously said that the process of choosing the shortlist was a “real agony”.
Founded in 1969, the Booker prize is awarded annually for the best original work of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
Last year, the Kent-born author Samantha Harvey took home the award for her space station saga Orbital. Other previous winners include Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Bernardine Evaristo, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, JM Coetzee, and Douglas Stuart.
