David Szalay Wins the 2025 Booker Prize for FLESH
Szalay’s FLESH, described as “extraordinary” by Booker judges.
We’re thrilled to share that David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize, one of the leading literary awards in the English-speaking world, for his novel FLESH, published by Penguin Random House UK (Jonathan Cape) and Penguin Random House Canada (McClelland & Stewart).
The Booker Prize, awarded annually to “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the U.K. or Ireland,” has recognized outstanding literary achievement for more than fifty years. As the winner, Szalay receives £50,000, and each of the six shortlisted authors receives £2,500. The winner was announced by this year’s judging panel, which included 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, award-winning actor and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, writer and critic Chris Power, and author Kiley Reid.
Speaking about the novel, Roddy Doyle said that he and the other judges “had never read anything quite like it…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 ©Jonas Matyassy
Szalay is the author of six acclaimed works of fiction, translated into over twenty languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut, LONDON AND THE SOUTH-EAST, earned both the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. His 2016 novel ALL THAT MAN IS won the Gordon Burn and Plimpton prizes and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that same year.
Named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and among The Telegraph’s top 20 British writers under 40, Szalay has long been celebrated as one of the most original voices in contemporary fiction. FLESH cements his place among the greats of modern literature.
Read an interview with David Szalay on the Booker Prizes website here.
About FLESH by David Szalay
A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.