The author of Flesh, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, reflects on the most inspiring books from his youth, his love of Samuel Pepys’s diaries, and why 6am is his best time to write
David Szalay
Winner of the Booker Prize 2025 for Flesh. David Szalay was born in Canada, grew up in London and now lives in Vienna
He is the author of six works of fiction that have been translated into over 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut novel, London and the South-East, won Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. All That Man Is was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016.
He was selected for the 2013 edition of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2010 appeared in the Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40. In November 2025, Flesh won the Booker Prize.
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Using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life
The Booker Prize 2025 judges on Flesh
Flesh
Winner of The Booker Prize 2025
- By
- David Szalay
- Published by
- Jonathan Cape
Flesh is the winner of the Booker Prize 2025. A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp
Other nominated books
David Szalay discerns a shared longing in the hearts of nine ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking and despicable, vital, pitiable, hilarious men
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