David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh

Szalay received £50,000 and the Booker Prize trophy at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London, presented to him by last year’s winner, Samantha Harvey.

Flesh was selected from 153 eligible titles by this year’s judging panel, chaired by writer Roddy Doyle, himself the 1993 Booker Prize winner.

He is the first former winner to chair a Booker judging panel.

The other judges were novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, actor and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, writer and critic Chris Power, and author Kiley Reid.

The prize recognises the best work of long-form fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.

Szalay’s sixth work of fiction, Flesh follows a character named István over several decades, tracing his journey from a housing estate in Hungary to the world of London’s wealthy elite. The novel explores themes of class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity.

“The book we kept returning to, the one that stood out from the other great novels, was Flesh – because of its singularity,” Doyle was quoted as saying by the official webiste of the Booker Prize.

He said: “We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book, but it is a joy to read.”