Szalay wins 2025 Booker Prize for “Flesh”
David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize, worth £50,000 (A$100,800), for Flesh (Jonathan Cape).
“Written in spare prose, and spanning decades – from a Hungarian housing estate to the mansions of London’s rich elite – Flesh is a propulsive novel centred on an emotionally detached man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp,” said the prize organisers.
Chair of judges and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle said, “At the end of the novel, we don’t know what the protagonist, István, looks like, but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it’s the absence of words – or the absence of István’s words – that allow us to know István. Early in the book, we know that he cries because the person he’s with tells him not to; later in life, we know he’s balding because he envies another man’s hair; we know he grieves because, for several pages, there are no words at all.
“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, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him. The writing is spare, and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living, and as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading – experiencing – this extraordinary, singular novel.”
Szalay is the author of 6 works of fiction, including All That Man Is (Vintage), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 and won the Gordon Burn Prize and George Plimpton Prize for Fiction. His debut novel, London and the South-East (Vintage), won the Betty Trask Prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Szalay was selected for the 2013 edition of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2010, he appeared in the Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40. Born in Canada, Szalay now lives in Vienna. He is the first Hungarian British writer to win the Booker.
Judges selected Flesh as the winning book after considering 153 submissions and selecting a longlist of 13 books and a shortlist of 6 books. Along with Doyle, the judging panel included author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and author Kiley Reid.
Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital (Vintage).
More information about the award is available at the Booker Prize website.
Photo credit: David Parry for the Booker Prize Foundation.
Category: International awards International news
