David Szalay wins the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh

David Szalay won the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, announced on 10 November 2025 at Old Billingsgate in London. He receives £50,000. The judging panel was chaired by Roddy Doyle and included Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Chris Power, Kiley Reid and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Flesh follows István, a Hungarian man, from his teenage years to middle age and from Hungary to London, where he comes into close contact with the very rich. It is written in notably spare prose, and the judges singled out its use of white space on the page. It is Szalay's sixth book.

Szalay was previously shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is. He is the first British-Hungarian author to win the Booker. The other shortlisted books were Flashlight by Susan Choi, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, Audition by Katie Kitamura, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits and The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller.

Flesh is an example of a book that takes a formal risk and leaves a good deal unsaid, trusting the reader to fill in the gaps. That kind of restraint is hard to sustain across a whole novel, and harder still to sell to a publisher on a synopsis. Its success is a modest encouragement to writers who work by subtraction rather than accumulation.

Sources: NPR: 'Flesh' wins 2025 Booker Prize; Wikipedia: 2025 Booker Prize.