Meet the winner of the Booker Prize 2025
Hungarian-British author David Szalay takes home the prestigious prize with his novel, Flesh.
Flesh follows the life of István from his early years as a teen in a Hungarian housing estate. Throughout the novel, he embarks on several journeys, including clandestine relationships with women, a military stint as a soldier in Iraq, and a relocation to London, where he encounters–and joins–the upper echelons of British society. Szalay’s minimalist writing style employs spare prose and dialogue, positioning István as the detached emotional anchor to his explorations of war, wealth, and what it means to live.
(Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images)
Flesh is David Szalay’s sixth novel. In 2016, his novel All That Man Is was shortlisted for The Booker Prize.
“Flesh was a risky novel,” says Szalay in his acceptance speech. “This sense of risk, which I keep coming back to, was there in the process of writing the book. It felt important to take the risk–aesthetic or moral risks– because it’s one of the things fiction can do. It is something other narrative forms can’t do to the same extent. It’s important that [we] embrace this sense of risk, rather than shun it.”
As the winner of the Booker Prize, Szalay receives £50,000 and a trophy presented to him by Samantha Harvey, whose book Orbital won the prize in 2024. He was selected as the winner from a shortlist of impressive entrants, including Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Susan Choi’s Flashlight.
