David Szalay’s Flesh wins 2025 fiction award

British-Hungarian creator David Szalay has received this 12 months’s Booker Prize for his novel Flesh, which the judges described as “extraordinary” and “a very special book”.

Flesh tells the story of an alluring, enigmatic and emotionally indifferent man who’s swept by way of completely different phases of his life, from a Hungarian housing property to the world of the ultra-rich in London.

“What we particularly liked about Flesh was its singularity. It’s just not like any other book,” stated creator Roddy Doyle, who chaired the judging panel. “It’s a dark book, but we all found it a joy to read.”

Actress Sarah Jessica Parker was among the many different Booker judges, whereas Flesh has been championed by Dua Lipa and Stormzy.

Szalay instructed the BBC he was feeling a “bit dazed” after profitable the prize and it was going to take some time to “sink in”.

“I did maybe too thorough a job of convincing myself that I wasn’t going to win in order to get through the evening without too much stress, and now I have to catch up a bit in my head,” he stated.

“But it’s fantastic, of course.”

Stormzy recorded an extract of the ebook for a short film that was performed on the Booker Prize ceremony in London on Monday.

And Dua Lipa described it as a “tense and gripping read” when she picked it for her book club last month.

Flesh has had rave opinions throughout the board.

The Guardian called it a “brilliantly spare portrait of a man” and a “thrilling exploration of what it means to be alive”, whereas the Sunday Times praised how Szalay makes use of “just one character, Istvan, to tell these three stages of modern man”.

Critics and judges have additionally praised Szalay’s pared-down, minimalist dialogue and descriptions.

“We loved the spareness of the writing,” Doyle defined. “We loved how so much is revealed without us being overly aware of it being revealed.

“It’s simply extraordinary how he makes use of white area. Grief is depicted by just a few clean pages.”

Referring to the writing style, Doyle added: “I discovered it riveting, and I believed the dialogue was excellent – and the absence of it was excellent.”

Booker organisers described Flesh as “a meditation on class, energy, intimacy, migration and masculinity”, and called it “a compelling portrait of 1 man, and the formative experiences that may reverberate throughout a lifetime”.

The judges spent more than five hours discussing the six shortlisted novels before settling on the winner. Doyle said it became “very clear that this was the ebook that every one 5 of us preferred most”.

“They discovered it spare, disciplined, pressing, trustworthy and heartbreaking,” said Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation.

“With Flesh, all of them agreed, David Szalay breaks new floor. I share the judges’ pleasure over the work of an creator who has been writing with ferocious and stark dedication for a few years.”

Flesh is Szalay’s sixth novel, and he was previously nominated for the Booker for All That Man Is, another exploration of modern masculinity, in 2016.

He collected £50,000 as this year’s winner.

The other shortlisted novels were:

• Susan Choi – Flashlight
• Kiran Desai – The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
• Katie Kitamura – Audition
• Ben Markovits – The Rest of Our Lives
• Andrew Miller – The Land in Winter

The Booker Prize is the UK’s most prestigious fiction award and is open to novels written in the English language.

Past winners embrace Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Bernardine Evaristo, Hilary Mantel and Douglas Stuart.