On the morning of the 2025 Booker Prize ceremony this week, instead of practising deep breathing exercises, anxiously scrolling or rehearsing a prepared speech, shortlisted author David Szalay was in a suit-rental store trying to convince the proprietor to cancel his order and give him his money back.
“I still thought until Sunday it was a black-tie, dinner-jacket event,” he confesses, over Zoom. “And then, thank God, in the course of a conversation with someone, it came up that no, that isn’t the dress code any more. Otherwise, I would have showed up the only guy dressed like that. It would have been like being the kid who comes in in uniform on dress-down day.”
The ceremony, which took place on Monday night in Old Billingsgate in London, may have shed its black-tie rules, but it remains one of the more glamorous events on the literary calendar. London’s bookish high society gathers to celebrate a prize that promises £50,000 (€57,000), as well as a significant boost in book sales, to the winner (last year’s chosen title, Orbital, sold more than 20,000 print copies in the UK in the week following the announcement). This year, when Szalay was announced to have emerged victorious from the shortlist of Susan Choi, Kiran Desai, Katie Kitamura, Ben Markovits and Andrew Miller, he stood onstage, bedecked appropriately in a suit and tie, and spoke of how bewildering it was that the struggle of writing the novel and “this glittering evening” were part of the same experience.
In fact, this wasn’t the first rodeo for the 51-year-old. In 2016, Szalay made the shortlist for his collection of interlinked short stories, All That Man Is, but missed out to Paul Beatty (The Sellout). This time around, for self-preservation’s sake, he managed to convince himself he wouldn’t win.
RM Block
“I was so stressed out [in 2016], it was so tense and unpleasant, that I really wanted this time not to have quite that experience,” he says. “I did make an effort to try to stay as calm as possible, just for my mental wellbeing. That involved persuading myself that I wasn’t going to win – I did very thoroughly persuade myself – and that carried through right through the evening. I was eerily calm. People were commenting afterwards that they’d seen me eat most of the meal, and how extraordinary that was.”
He ate “the food that was put in front of me” – some meat, a “sort of” risotto, a tart, a glass of wine, “but only one”.
“That was more because I had a slight cold, which I still have, than because I was worried about being drunk and having to make a speech,” he says. “I had really persuaded myself that it wasn’t going to happen.”
Then his name was announced, and he sat there in a “moment of genuine shock”.
“It’s a completely surreal, dreamlike moment. It’s probably like that for everybody. But it really did feel like something that, on one level, wasn’t really happening.”
I really did feel more pressure than I ever have in terms of writing
— David Szalay
The 2020 winner, Douglas Stuart, gave him a “hug, practically”, at the after-party. Another former winner, Ben Okri, congratulated him at a reception hosted by Queen Camilla. But it was Irish former winner and 2025 chair of judges Roddy Doyle whose advice stuck with him. “Say no to everything,” Doyle insisted, onstage (as, no doubt, the legions of journalists scheduled to interview Szalay, squirmed).
“I really appreciate his simple, practical and public advice,” Szalay says. “The fact that he said it publicly means that everyone knows that he told me that, and I can cite him as the source.”
When it comes to the prize money, Szalay doesn’t have any wild plans. “I’m not going to go out and buy a car for 50 grand or anything,” he says. “It will probably just go into day-to-day living. Gas bills, mortgage.”
Alongside Doyle on the judging panel were formerly longlisted novelists Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Kiley Reid; actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; and writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power. Commenting on their choice at press briefing, Doyle described Flesh as “singular” and remarked that neither he nor his fellow judges could think of obvious comparative novels.
Indeed, the book has a unique and arresting style, as it tells, in clipped snapshots, the life story of István, beginning in his native Hungary with a confusing sexual experience aged 15, surging onwards, past stints in a young offenders’ institution and the military in Iraq, to his days in London, where he climbs the social order to eventually rub shoulders with the chosen elite.
Szalay was living in Hungary when he wrote the book (born in Canada to a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, Szalay grew up in England and has lived in Lebanon, Hungary and now Vienna). He was under contract with his publisher and had been working on another book for years but had chosen to abandon it.
“That was a difficult context in which to start writing a book,” he says. “I really did feel more pressure than I ever have in terms of writing.”
He went on to abandon Flesh several times, too, in the early stages.
“I would write a few thousand words and then go: oh God, no, this won’t do, I’ll do something else. I’d put it aside and try to do something else, but then look again at the stuff I’d written for Flesh and think, oh, this is quite good, maybe I should carry on.”
This happened several times “like a plane almost failing to take off”. An early violent altercation that ends up defining István’s life was one Szalay repeatedly removed, for fear it was “melodramatic”.
“[I’d think] this is too much. This takes it into territory which belongs in another kind of novel, maybe. But then I’d read the version without it and think: I’m just being a coward. […] When I finally put that back in definitively, it set the path in terms of: things like that can happen in this book – quite extreme incidents of violence, shocking things that completely turn things around.”
In his acceptance speech, Szalay noted the importance of risk when writing this (and any) novel.
There were several things in the book that “made everyone [including his editors] feel a bit uneasy”, he explains. The title was not very “literary seeming”. Some of the sexual content “risked being in bad taste”. But in conversations over what to remove and leave in, he and his editors “consistently chose the riskier option”.
“It felt risky when writing it,” he says. “I’m not just saying this now [having won], I’m trying to talk about an actual feeling at the time. It felt risky to have a character who was relatively inarticulate, who didn’t really explain himself, who didn’t define himself in words for the reader.”
A key characteristic of both István and the book’s prose is a sort of linguistic reticence; István is a man of few words, the pages of this text contain much blank space and long passages of almost banal (though often very humorous) dialogue.
“All good books are, in a way, an expression of the power and potential of language,” says Szalay. “But this book, I also wanted to be about the limitations of language, in a sense; what language can’t express, and what can only be expressed by silence.
“That silence can only be expressive in a particular context,” he continues. “There are various kinds of silence in the book – between chapters, there are long stretches of time which aren’t described, that’s a kind of silence. And there’s the sort of inarticulacy of the dialogue. The repeated use of the word okay, by the central character, ultimately ends up being a kind of silence. The book is about silence, or the idea of silence is important to it.”
An oft-noted feature of the book is its depiction of masculinity. In a Financial Times review, author and critic Luke Brown observed that “[s]uch novels are now rare, as male writers seem increasingly frightened to describe and reckon with the potentially destructive aspects of their character”. But is masculinity something Szalay thinks about as he writes – was he trying to put forward a certain vision of maleness in this book?
“No, I wasn’t trying to put forward a certain vision of maleness,” he says. “There was absolutely no agenda, in that respect. I mean, I’m not going to insist that the book is not about masculinity, because to some extent it is. Any book with a male protagonist, and particularly a book which has this physicality, is going to feel like it’s about that. But I neither had a particular agenda I wanted to express, nor was [masculinity] really the main theme of the book. The book is about other things for me.”
These other things include “time, and fate, and the physicality of experience, which isn’t only a masculine thing”, he says. “The book happens to have a male protagonist and so his experience is central. But that physical texture and reality in which we all live is not obviously a male thing.”
Contemporary Europe was also on Szalay’s mind, in particular the phenomenon of people from central and eastern Europe moving to western Europe for economic reasons.
“István himself is one of those people. […] When Brexit took place and it was necessary to count the number of EU nationals living in Britain in order to issue them with new documents to reflect the changing circumstances, there were far more than had been estimated before. I know these won’t all be [central and eastern Europeans], but the total number was extraordinary. […] [I wanted] to write about these major social phenomena that are very much part of the landscape of contemporary Europe.”
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This year’s shortlist favoured mid-career writers, and Szalay is no exception. He began publishing in 2008, with his debut novel London and the South-East (partly inspired by a stint working as a financial advertising sales executive) and is today the author of six works of fiction, including the aforementioned All That Man Is (2016), the prize-winning short-story collection, Turbulence (2018) and Flesh.
He’s more than halfway through his next project, the writing of which sometimes takes place in Vienna, where he lives with his wife and young son, sometimes in a house he owns in Slovenia – “in the middle of nowhere, which is great for working”.
Reflecting on what it has taken to get him to this point in his career, he says: “After I didn’t win in 2016, I remember saying to myself, and also in interviews, that obviously I would have liked to have won, but one of the positive aspects of not winning is that the disappointment preserved a sharpness in me as a writer – the desire to keep doing the best I can and really push myself and strain myself in a way, to write the best book I can.”
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Having won, he understands he’s “going to have to find a way of trying to maintain that sharpness and hunger”.
“I’m not going to name any names, but I have noticed that very often, after winning this prize, people either don’t write anything for a very long time, or it turns out to be the peak of their career and all the books they write after that are not quite as good, perhaps, as the book that won. If possible, I’d like to avoid that.”
