David Szalay wins Booker Prize for ‘Flesh’
Team L&M
Flesh by David Szalay has won the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction 2025. This novel is the sixth work of fiction by Szalay, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2016. With this, he becomes the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. Born in Canada, he has lived in Lebanon, the UK, Hungary, and now resides in Vienna.
His earlier six books – works of fiction – have been translated into more than 20 languages, as well as adapted to several BBC radio dramas. His debut novel London and the South-East (2008) won both the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes. All That Man Is was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016; it went on to win the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction.
“There was a sense of risk being taken. And I think it’s very important that we did take those risks. Fiction can take risks – aesthetic, formal or even moral risks. It’s important the novel community embraces risk,” Szalay said while accepting the prize at a ceremony in London on Monday, 10 November.
What’s Flesh all about
A spare yet propulsive novel, Flesh (Penguin Random House) follows István, a man whose life is quietly unravelled by forces beyond his control.
At 15, he lives with his mother in a small Hungarian town. An unexpected and illicit relationship sets off a series of events that shape his life in ways he cannot foresee. As he moves from adolescence to old age, from the Hungarian Army to the glittering yet hollow world of London’s super-rich, István wrestles with desire, loss, power, and meaning.
Flesh opens quietly, with a boy, a move, and a question, and unfolds into something unforgettable:
‘When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts at a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making friends…’
