David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, which PW’s review called a “heartbreaking and revelatory portrait of a taciturn Hungarian man who serially attempts to build a new life after his traumatic adolescence.”
The book is the sixth work of fiction by Szalay, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 for All That Man Is, published by Graywolf. Flesh is Szalay’s second novel to be published in the U.S. by Scribner, after 2021’s Turbulence. Szalay, the first Hungarian-British author to win the prize, was joined on the 2025 shortlist by Americans Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura, and Ben Markovits, as well as Kiran Desai and Andrew Miller.
“Flesh is a disquisition on the art of being alive, and all the affliction that comes along with it,” the Booker Prize judges wrote in their citation. “The emotional detachment of the main character, István, is sustained by the tremendous movement of the plot. The pace of this novel speaks to one of the greater themes; the detachment of our bodies from our decisions.”
Szalay was presented with the Booker trophy and £50,000 by last year’s winner, Samantha Harvey, at a ceremony held November 10 at Old Billingsgate in London.
“The judges discussed the six books on the shortlist for more than five hours,” said Roddy Doyle, chair of the Booker judges, in a statement. “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.”
In an interview published by the Booker Prizes following the announcement of this year’s longlist, Szalay said that the book emerged from a desire 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.”
