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David Szalay received the £50,000 Booker Prize for his book Flesh at an award ceremony in London on Monday evening.Alberto Pezzali/The Associated Press
Canadian-born author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh, a dark story about a Hungarian man from a working-class background whose life slowly unravels after he reaches the top of society in London.
Mr. Szalay, 51, was born in Montreal to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father. The family moved to Beirut when Mr. Szalay was an infant and then left for London a year later when the Lebanese civil war broke out. He now lives in Vienna.
He received the £50,000 prize, about $92,400, at an award ceremony in London on Monday evening.
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Flesh won out over five other short-listed books: Flashlight by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura and The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits – all from the United States – as well as The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Indian author Kiran Desai and The Land in Winter by British author Andrew Miller.
Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who chaired the five-member jury, said the judges debated for more than five hours and Flesh emerged as the unanimous choice.
“We didn’t need a formal vote. I didn’t ask for a show of hands. It was very clear that this was the book that all five of us liked more,” he told reporters on Monday. “It’s the one we admired most.”
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Using sparse prose, Flesh tells a story of love and longing through the life of István, who rises from a poor neighbourhood in Hungary to the mansions of London. Along the way, István serves time in jail, joins the Hungarian army and enters the world of the super-rich after landing a job as a driver for a British businessman and then having an affair with his wife.
“We loved the spareness of the writing,” Mr. Doyle said. “We loved how so much was revealed without us being overly aware that it was being revealed.” He noted, for example, that Mr. Szalay used blank pages to depict grief and said that even though the story is often dark, “we all found it quite a joy to read.”
Mr. Doyle, who won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, read the book three times as part of the judging process and said he would gladly read it again. “I’ve only read my own books once. I’d read this again four or five, six times. Happily. It’s just, I think, brilliant.”
Flesh has been described as a commentary on masculinity, and Mr. Doyle said that much of what readers learn about István “comes from women’s observations of him, which is interesting, or his reaction to women.”
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From left: Ben Markovits with his book The Rest of Our Lives, Katie Kitamura with her book Audition, Susan Choi with her book Flashlight, Szalay with his book Flesh, Andrew Miller with his book The Land in Winter and Kiran Desai with her book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, in London on Sunday.CHRIS J RATCLIFFE/AFP/Getty Images
Flesh is Mr. Szalay’s sixth novel; he previously made the Booker Prize short list in 2016 for All That Man Is.
In an earlier interview with the BBC, Mr. Szalay said he “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.” He added that he used the bare-bones writing style to reflect “the way that people actually speak.”
“It contributes to the sense of realism, which I think is absolutely key to the way the book works, which is of course what then generates emotional engagement,” he said.
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The Booker Prize was founded in 1969, and it is open to authors from anywhere in the world, writing in English, and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Previous winners have included Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood, who has won it twice.
The Booker Prize Foundation, which manages the award, is launching a Children’s Booker Prize next year to celebrate children’s literature and encourage more young people to read. The prize will be open to authors worldwide for works written in English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. Books translated into English will also be eligible.
The winner will receive £50,000, and a panel of judges composed of three children and three adults will select the winning entry.
