Congratulations to David Szalay who has been named the winner of this year's Booker Prize for his sparse and moving novel, Flesh.
Flesh was selected as the winning book by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, the first Booker Prize winner to chair a Booker judging panel. Doyle was joined by fellow judges: Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid. They considered 153 books and were looking for the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.
Written in spare prose, and spanning decades – from a Hungarian housing estate to the mansions of London’s rich elite – Flesh is a propulsive novel centred on an emotionally detached man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. The novel is the sixth work of fiction by David Szalay, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.
Roddy Doyle, Chair of judges, 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.
‘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 said of writing Flesh:
‘It can be hard to identify the starting point of a novel. Flesh sort of evolved into existence. I knew I wanted to write a book with a Hungarian end and an English end, since I was living very much between the two countries at the time and felt that that needed to be reflected in my choice of subject. And given that, writing about a Hungarian immigrant at the time when Hungary joined the EU seemed like an obvious way to go. So it would be, to some extent, 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. Those were the ingredients that I started with.’
Read more about The Booker Prize here and rediscover the shortlisted titles here.
