David Szalay wins 2025 Booker prize for ‘dark’ Flesh | Booker prize

Hungarian-British author David Szalay won the 2025 Booker prize for his novel Flesh.

Szalay’s sixth work of fiction traces the life of a man named István from his youth to middle age. Panel chairman Roddy Doyle, who won the award in 1993, said the judges had “never read anything like it”. “It’s a dark book in many ways, but it’s fun to read.”

Flesh opens with a shocking event that occurs when young István is living in an apartment complex with his mother in Hungary. Szalay then follows the protagonist as he spends time in the army before moving to London, where he begins working for the ultra-rich. Written in abundant prose, the novel explores masculinity, class, migration, trauma, gender and power.

Szalay was announced as the winner of the £50,000 prize at a ceremony held in Old Billingsgate, London, on Monday evening. He was previously nominated for the award in 2016 for his novel All That Man Is.

Doyle said the decision to give Szalay the award was “unanimous.” He was joined on this year’s panel by actor Sarah Jessica Parker as well as writers Chris Power, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and Kiley Reid.

Doyle said the book “focuses on a working-class man who is not normally given much notice.” “It presents us with a certain type of man” and “invites us to look behind the face.”

“I was raised to never cry, for example, without anyone being consciously aware of it,” Doyle said. “I realized that and decided it was nonsense,” but István is “that kind of guy.”

“Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive,” wrote Keiran Goddard in his Guardian review of the novel. “Stylistically, Flesh is just bones. Szalay has always been a master of simple and empty sentences, but in this novel he has handled some things even more brutally.”

Szalay’s novel topped a strong shortlist that also included Andrew Miller for the bookies’ favorite The Land in Winter and Kiran Desai, who was nominated for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since winning the Booker prize for The Inheritance of Loss in 2006. Other novels shortlisted this year were Flashlight by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura and The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits.

Asked if any of the other novels came close to challenging Szalay’s win, Doyle said “the answer is ‘sort of yes,'” but he declined to give specific titles, saying it would be “unfair, a little cruel.”

Born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and a Canadian mother, Szalay grew up in London. He has lived in Lebanon and the UK and now lives in Vienna. After graduating from Oxford, he worked as a sales executive in financial advertising, which inspired his first novel, London and the South East. He is also the author of the novels Bahar and Innocent, as well as the short story collection Turbulence.

Writing about his inspiration for Flesh in the Guardian over the weekend, Szalay said the novel was “conceived in the shadow of failure” – he abandoned a novel he had been working on for nearly four years in the autumn of 2020 that he felt was not working. He wanted Flesh to “somehow express my feeling that our existence is first and foremost a physical experience, that all other aspects of it flow from that physicality.”

His win is the 10th for publisher Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin, who has the most wins in the award’s history. Last year’s winning play, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, was also published by Cape.

Other recent winners include Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and Damon Galgut’s The Promise.

• Meat by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £16.14 from: guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.