David Szalay, a Hungarian-British novelist, has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh, which follows the fraught life of Istvan, a Hungarian émigré who rises into and then falls out of London high society. The 51-year-old author prevailed over five other shortlisted writers, including India’s Kiran Desai and Britain’s Andrew Miller, taking the £50,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Monday.
Flesh unfolds in lean, economical prose, tracing Istvan from a fraught adolescent relationship with an older woman, through years as a struggling immigrant in the UK, to his later existence among the wealthy. Prize organisers described the book as a meditation on class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity — a portrait of a single life whose formative moments echo across decades.
Accepting the trophy at Old Billingsgate, Szalay thanked the judges for backing what he called a “risky” novel and recalled asking his editor whether a book titled Flesh could ever win the Booker. He joked that the evening provided the answer.
Each shortlisted writer and their translators receive £2,500 in addition to the winner’s £50,000; success on the list typically brings a marked increase in sales and profile. Flesh was selected from 153 entries by a panel that included Irish novelist Roddy Doyle and actor Sarah Jessica Parker, alongside judges Chris Power, Ayobami Adebayo and Kiley Reid. Doyle said the panel reached a unanimous decision after a five-hour meeting, praising the book’s uniqueness, its dark yet joyful tone and its inventive use of white space that invites readers to engage actively with the character.
Szalay, born in Canada, raised in the UK and now living in Vienna, was previously a Booker finalist in 2016 for All That Man Is, a sequence of stories about nine different men. Flesh is his sixth work of fiction. Speaking to the BBC, he said his own sense of never feeling entirely at home in Hungary or in London informed his desire to write a novel straddling both places and featuring a protagonist who belongs nowhere entirely.
Before the announcement, betting markets had favoured Andrew Miller’s early-1960s domestic drama The Land in Winter and Kiran Desai’s globe-spanning The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since The Inheritance of Loss. The other shortlisted titles were Susan Choi’s family saga Flashlight, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, which explores acting and identity, and Ben Markovits’s midlife road story The Rest of Our Lives.
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a long record of propelling writers to wider recognition; past winners include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy and Margaret Atwood. Last year the prize went to Samantha Harvey for her space-station novel Orbital.
Separately, the International Booker Prize was awarded in May to Indian writer and activist Banu Mushtaq for Heart Lamp, a collection of 12 stories depicting the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.