F lesh by David Szalay was tonight, Monday, 10th November, named the winner of the Booker Prize 2025. Szalay receives £50,000 and a trophy, presented to him by last year’s winner Samantha Harvey, at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. The event was broadcast live as a special episode of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, hosted by Samira Ahmed. 

A LoveReading Star Book, LoveReading Reviewer Joanne Owen commented: "This brilliant existential novel explores a man’s accidental stumbling through life’s lows, highs and deeper lows with exquisite page-turning verve."

Written in spare prose, Flesh - Szalay’s sixth work of fiction - is a propulsive novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Spanning decades, it charts István’s rise from a housing estate in Hungary to the mansions of London's super-rich. A meditation on class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity, Flesh is a compelling portrait of one man, and the formative experiences that can reverberate across a lifetime.

What is The Booker Prize?

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction. The prize is open to authors from anywhere in the world, writing in English, and published in the UK and/or Ireland. It has rewarded and celebrated world-class talent for over 55 years, helping shape the canon of 20th and 21st century literature.

Previous winners of the prize include Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Marlon James, Bernardine Evaristo and Douglas Stuart.

Flesh was selected as the winning book by the 2025 judging panel, who all attended the ceremony. The panel was chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, the first Booker Prize winner to chair a Booker judging panel. He 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 1st October 2024 and 30th September 2025.

The Booker Judges' Comments

Roddy Doyle, Chair of the Booker Prize 2025 Judges, commented:

"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."

Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, adds:

"When the five judges took their places at the winner meeting, in the same room in Fortnum & Mason where they had first met in early February, they sat in the same seats. And they reflected, not only on the circularity of that moment after nine months of reading together, but on the curious fact that they had discussed half of the books that ended up on their shortlist that very first day. Those set a high standard, and by the end of the process the judges were so loath to part company with any of the six that they kept talking for five hours.

"Flesh was among the books they had discussed on day one. The judges returned to it, again and again, and felt more invested in it every time. After a third reading, they struggled to think of another writer whose work they could compare it to. They found it spare, disciplined, urgent, honest and heartbreaking. With Flesh, they all agreed, David Szalay breaks new ground."

This year’s Booker Prize campaign, ‘Fiction worth talking about’, is a celebration of the act of reading and discussing great books together. The campaign is designed to encourage readers to explore the nominated books, share their thoughts, and connect with others from around the world over their love of great fiction.

Who is David Szalay?

David Szalay is the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. Born in Canada, Szalay has lived in Lebanon, the UK, Hungary, and now Vienna. He worked as a financial advertising sales executive in the City of London before embarking on his writing career. In addition to writing novels, Szalay is as an accomplished writer of BBC radio dramas and short stories; in 2019 he won the Edge Hill Prize for his short story collection Turbulence. This year’s prize marked his second Booker shortlisting – his first was in 2016 for All That Man Is, which was also awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and George Plimpton Prize for Fickon. Szalay won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes in 2008 for his first novel, London and the South-East.

Szalay has received critical acclaim throughout his career. He was included in the Daily Telegraph’s 2010 list of the top 20 British writers under 40 and was a Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2013. Flesh was selected by the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and LoveReading as one of the best books to read in 2025, in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Sunday Times summer holiday reads, and was singer-songwriter Dua Lipa’s Service95 Monthly Read for October 2025. Booker Prize-shortlisted author Zadie Smith named Flesh as a book that should win a major literary prize in her interview for Elle.com ‘Shelf Life’, and selected it as her pick for BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read, adding: "It is astonishing. When I read, one of the things I’m looking for is ‘how has this person made the novel new?’ For me, this novel was new."

David Szalay’s comments on his Booker Prize-winning book

Speaking to the Booker Prizes website about the inspiration for Flesh, Szalay said: "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. 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."

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme, Szalay added: "Even though my father is Hungarian, I never felt entirely at home in Hungary. I suppose, I’m always a bit of an outsider there and living away from the UK and London for so many years I also had a similar feeling about London. So I really wanted to write a book that stretched between Hungary and London and involved a character who was not quite at home in either place."

Reaction to Flesh in the media

Joanne Owen, for LoveReading: LoveReading Literary Pick of the Month - April 2025: "Consummately compelling, Flesh is a cuttingly moving story of transformations, and accidents (happy and otherwise) that lays bare cold-blooded truths about the human condition, and how life is barely within our grasp or control. I couldn’t put it down."

Luke Brown for Financial Times: "Such novels are now rare, as male writers seem increasingly frightened to describe and reckon with the potentially destructive aspects of their character. In this context Flesh feels especially refreshing, illuminating and true. More than that, it is a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates."

Johanna Thomas-Corr for The Sunday Times: "Once or twice a year, I discover a novelist who is so exciting to read I want to share their work with everyone I know – the kind of writer who makes me want to write fiction... It’s rare to find prose this spare that doesn’t feel affected, but Szalay handles surface and depth with skill, as only great novelists can. Flesh is a revelatory novel that will make you look afresh at every eastern European doorman or bouncer you encounter."

Keiran Goddard for The Guardian: "There will be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues. Because, at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language."

Claire Allfree for the Daily Mail: "A superb, surprisingly propulsive novel, one of the best of the year so far, that allows us to know a character on a deeply intimate level with that character barely saying a word and which, through its flat, airless, colourless prose captures something of the alienated despairing fatalism at the heart of modern life."

The 2025 Booker Prize Lists

Remind yourself of the "brilliantly human" strong shortlist for 2025 or the longlist, and don't forget by buying with LoveReading, you can help create the next generation of readers by donating 25% of your spend to a school.

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