Flesh by David Szalay wins the Booker Prize 2025

• Chair of the judges Roddy Doyle describes Flesh as ‘an extraordinary, singular novel’: ‘a dark book that is a joy to read’ 
• David Szalay, who was previously shortlisted in 2016, is the first Hungarian-British author to win the Booker Prize  
• Szalay said of writing Flesh: ‘I wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world’ 
• An extract from Flesh, performed by multi-award-winning musician Stormzy for the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist films, was screened at the ceremony 
• Following the recent announcement of the Children’s Booker Prize, this year’s keynote speech was delivered by Penelope Lively, the only author to have won both the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction and the Booker Prize 

‘The judges discussed the six books on the shortlist for more than five hours. The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the other great novels, was Flesh – because of its singularity. We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read. 

‘At the end of the novel, we don’t know what the protagonist, István, looks like but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it’s the absence of words – or the absence of István’s words – that allow us to know István. Early in the book, we know that he cries because the person he’s with tells him not to; later in life, we know he’s balding because he envies another man’s hair; we know he grieves because, for several pages, there are no words at all.   

‘I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him. The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. 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.’ 

David Szalay is the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. Born in Canada, Szalay has lived in Lebanon, the UK, Hungary, and now Vienna. He worked as a financial advertising sales executive in the City of London before embarking on his writing career. In addition to writing novels, Szalay is as an accomplished writer of BBC radio dramas and short stories; in 2019 he won the Edge Hill Prize for his short story collection Turbulence. This year’s prize marked his second Booker shortlisting – his first was in 2016 for All That Man Is, which was also awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and George Plimpton Prize for Fiction. Szalay won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes in 2008 for his first novel, London and the South-East.  

Szalay has received critical acclaim throughout his career. He was included in the Daily Telegraph’s 2010 list of the top 20 British writers under 40 and was a Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2013. Flesh was selected by the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph as one of the best books to read in 2025, in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Sunday Times summer holiday reads, and was singer-songwriter Dua Lipa’s Service95 Monthly Read for October 2025. Booker Prize-shortlisted author Zadie Smith named Flesh as a book that should win a major literary prize in her interview for Elle.com ‘Shelf Life’, and selected it as her pick for BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read, adding: ‘It is astonishing. When I read, one of the things I’m looking for is ‘how has this person made the novel new?’ For me, this novel was new’.  

Flesh was the bookmaker William Hill’s third favourite to win at 4/1. Lee Phelps, spokesperson for William Hill, said in a statement on the William Hill website ahead of today’s prize announcement: ‘This year’s shortlist is looking remarkably tight, with little to split the six contenders.’  

Szalay is not the only writer of Hungarian heritage to have won the Booker or International Booker Prize: László Krasznahorkai, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, won the International Booker Prize in 2015. He became the fifth International Booker Prize-nominated author – along with Han Kang, Jon Fosse, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk – to go on to win the Nobel. 

Flesh’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, has published the most Booker Prize winners in the history of the prize, with nine previous Booker winners: in 1974 (The Conservationist), 1976 (Saville), 1981 (Midnight’s Children), 1984 (Hotel du Lac), 1991 (The Famished Road), 1998 (Amsterdam), 2007 (The Gathering), 2011 (The Sense of an Ending) and 2024 (Orbital). 

Luke Brown, the Financial Times: ‘Such novels are now rare, as male writers seem increasingly frightened to describe and reckon with the potentially destructive aspects of their character. In this context Flesh feels especially refreshing, illuminating and true. More than that, it is a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates.’  

Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times: ‘Once or twice a year, I discover a novelist who is so exciting to  read I want to share their work with everyone I know – the kind of writer who makes me want to write fiction… It’s rare to find prose this spare that doesn’t feel affected, but Szalay handles surface and depth with skill, as only great novelists can. Flesh is a revelatory novel that will make you look afresh at every eastern European doorman or bouncer you encounter.’ 

Keiran Goddard, The Guardian: ‘There will be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues. Because, at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language.’ 

Claire Allfree in the Daily Mail: ‘A superb, surprisingly propulsive novel, one of the best of the year so far, that allows us to know a character on a deeply intimate level with that character barely saying a word and which, through its flat, airless, colourless prose captures something of the alienated despairing fatalism at the heart of modern life.’ 

During the ceremony, Harvey described her win as a ‘magnificent ambush’ and said:  

‘When I was young, writers were my gods and this prize was my pantheon. To have received it, to be standing here, (is) to have had such outrageous good fortune.  

‘This prize has brought more than I can possibly say, but above all it’s brought me readers, and the understanding of how readers gather – increasingly I think – around books, in groups, in communities, as if gathering around fires, finding solace and shared experience and cause for hope and warmth and pleasure. The Booker Prize helps books become little movements.’ 

The keynote speech was delivered by much-loved author Penelope Lively, the only recipient of both the Booker Prize (for Moon Tiger, 1987) and the Carnegie Medal, the UK’s longest-running children’s book award (for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, 1973).   

Speaking in response to the recent announcement by the Booker Prize Foundation of the Children’s Booker Prize supported by AKO Foundation, which from 2026 will celebrate the best fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, Lively shared the reasons she thinks children’s literature should be celebrated:  

‘Children’s literature is not tethered to time. It floats free, whether written yesterday or a hundred years ago. The author of an adult novel is of their time. The issues of the day tend to creep around the narrative – issues, attitudes, assumptions. Harder to float free, and in a sense not required. We are writing now, we reflect our time, we need to.  

‘The writer of a children’s book has license to abandon time and place, to create, to propose alternatives. It is an indulgence, and a hazard. The writer must find a language, a universe, that will persuade all, the literary innocent that is the child, the sophisticated adult reader. And that is what the great children’s books have done. And will continue to do. Encouraged now by this new Booker Prize.’ 

The Booker Prize trophy, presented to Szalay, was originally designed by the beloved children’s author and illustrator Jan Pieńkowski in 1969, and was reinstated in 2022. In 2023 it was named Iris in a public vote, in honour of Iris Murdoch, who won the Booker Prize in 1978. This year’s trophy was made by South London Foundry. 

Each of the shortlisted authors for the Booker Prize 2025 receives £2,500 and a unique, hand-bound edition of their book designed by six Fellows of the Designer Bookbinders society, which were on display at the ceremony. The winner’s binding was created by Stuart Brockman. Find out more about the bound books here. 

Films directed by award-winning writer-director Sasha Nathwani, featuring actors and artists performing extracts from the shortlisted books, were also screened. The films starred Gabrielle Creevy, Rory Kinnear, Shazad Latif, Katherine Parkinson and Arlo Parks, with an extract from the winning book read by Stormzy. The films, which have been viewed more than 50 million times, can be found on the Booker Prizes website and YouTube channel.  

Please contact the Booker Prizes PR team at Premier: [email protected] / [email protected] / +44 7780 705 086