David Szalay’s novel Flesh, a meditation on male sexuality and violence, migration, class and power, has won this year’s Booker Prize, worth £50,000, presented to him by last year’s winner Samantha Harvey at a ceremony in London this evening.
Szalay’s sixth work of fiction is a lean, propulsive and compelling portrait of a man unravelled by events beyond his grasp, and the formative experiences that can reverberate across a lifetime. It charts István’s rise from awkward teenager on a housing estate in Hungary to the mansions of London’s super-rich, well into his 60s.
Irish author Roddy Doyle, who chaired the Booker Prize 2025 judges – the first previous winner to do so, said: “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.
RM Block
“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.”
The other judges were actor and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; and writers Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Chris Power and Kiley Reid.
Reviewing Flesh for The Irish Times, John Boyne called it “compulsively readable ... his best novel yet, quietly traumatising, with memorable characters and a rather brilliant last line”.
Szalay (51), the son of a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, grew up in London. After graduating Oxford University, he sold financial advertising in the City of London, which inspired his debut novel, London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes in 2008. He moved to Hungary the following year and now lives in Vienna with his second wife. After The Innocent (2009) and Spring (2011), his fourth novel All That Man Is (2016) won the Gordon Burn Prize and George Plimpton Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. “It made it possible to live and work as a writer,” he told the Telegraph. “The Booker is a precious thing.” In 2019 he won the Edge Hill Prize for his short story collection Turbulence.
In an interview on the Booker Prize website, Szalay said he wanted to write “a novel about contemporary Europe, and about the cultural and economic divides that characterise it. I also wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world – whatever divides us, we all share that”.
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Flesh is “a story collection hiding inside a novel”, Szalay has said, linked stories that “lean into the short attention span of our era”. Discussing his stripped-back dialogue in an interview with Dua Lipa, Szalay said: “I wanted to write dialogue which reflected the way that people actually speak. It contributes to the sense of realism, which I think is absolutely key to the way the book works, which is of course what then generates emotional engagement.
“The language that I’ve come to use as a writer is very pared down – unliterary or unshowy, perhaps quite simple.”
Flesh is publisher Jonathan Cape’s 10th Booker Prize winner – a record.
