The Booker Prize 2025 has crowned its winner – and, in a result that surprised the bookies, Hungarian-British novelist David Szalay has taken home the £50,000 award for his daring and deeply compelling novel Flesh.
At a glittering ceremony at Old Billingsgate, London, Szalay accepted the trophy from last year’s winner, Samantha Harvey, for what chair of judges Roddy Doyle described as "an extraordinary, singular novel… a dark book that is a joy to read."
Written in Szalay’s signature pared-back prose, Flesh follows István, a boy growing up in provincial Hungary who gets caught up in an intense relationship with an older married woman – an encounter that alters the course of his life. It's a novel that asks, at its heart, what makes a life worth living and what breaks it.
The 2025 shortlist featured the bookies’ favourites – Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – alongside The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits, Audition by Katie Kitamura, and Flashlight by Susan Choi.
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Following his clandestine relationship with an older married woman, as the years unfold, István rises through the ranks of 21st-century Europe to join the super-rich elite, chasing love, intimacy, and status until the success he’s built threatens to consume him.
Winner of two historical fiction awards, and a 2025 Booker Prize nominee, Miller's tale set in rural England in 1962 follows two couples. When the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can't leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?
Sonia, an aspiring novelist, is returning from studying in snowy Vermont to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together.
When Tom's wife had an affair, he resolved to leave her once their children had grown up. 12 years later, after driving his daughter to university, he remembers his pact and keeps driving West to visit friends, family and an old girlfriend. But he has secrets of his own, and sometimes running away is the hardest thing to do.
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day.
One evening during a summer away in japan, 10-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.
"Flesh is a book about living, and the strangeness of living – one that reminds us, as we turn the pages, how glad we are to be alive and reading," said Doyle.
"I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author is inviting the reader to fill that space – to observe, almost to create, the character with him."
The evening itself shimmered with celebrity stardust. Among the guests were actor and producer Sarah Jessica Parker, who served on this year’s judging panel and was resplendent in a satin corset dress, alongside familiar faces Ruth Jones, Sir Lenny Henry, Bridgerton’s Adjoa Andoh, The White Lotus actor, Jason Isaacs, and Charles Dance.
An excerpt of Flesh read and performed by multi-award-winning musician Stormzy (below), originally created for the Booker Prize shortlist series, was also screened.
In his acceptance speech, Szalay reflected on the novel’s uncertain beginnings and the creative risks behind it. He revealed that, when discussing the title with his editor, they’d wondered aloud whether a book called Flesh could ever win the Booker Prize – a reflection, he said, of how ‘risky’ the project had felt from the start.
That gamble, it seems, paid off.
Already shortlisted once before, in 2016 for All That Man Is, Szalay now becomes the first Hungarian-British author ever to win the Booker Prize.
Now in its 55th year, the Booker Prize remains the world’s most prestigious award for a single work of fiction in English. With past winners from Salman Rushdie to Hilary Mantel, it continues to shape the modern literary canon and spotlight voices that redefine the form.
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