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Hungarian-British author David Szalay has been awarded the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, a sparse, quietly devastating novel that follows a single character, István, from his teenage years in Hungary through military service and eventually to London, where he finds himself working among the ultra-wealthy.

Announced at a ceremony in London’s Old Billingsgate on Monday evening, the win marks Szalay’s first Booker victory (though he previously came close — he was shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is). The panel’s chair, writer Roddy Doyle, who won the Booker in 1993, said the decision this year was unanimous.

The judges, who included actor Sarah Jessica Parker and writers Chris Power, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and Kiley Reid, said they had “never read anything quite like it”. Doyle described Flesh as “in many ways a dark book,” but also “a joy to read”.

At just over 200 pages and written in language razor-sharp in its simplicity, Flesh isn’t a novel that indulges in flourishes. Instead, it sits in the body, its aches, its regrets, its unspoken codes. The book tracks masculinity not through grand declarations but through the ways boys are taught to harden. Doyle put it plainly, reflecting on the character of István: “It presents us with a certain type of man and invites us to look behind the face.”

The novel opens with a disturbing scene in the apartment complex where István lives with his mother. From there, Szalay follows him as he grows into adulthood, navigating class divides, migration, labour and power. Love appears in the novel, but uneasily. Violence is quieter than expected, but ever-present.

Critics have praised Szalay for pushing his minimalist style even further. In a Guardian review, Keiran Goddard wrote, “Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. Szalay has always been a master of the flinty, spare sentence, but in this novel, he has pared things back even more brutally.”

But if the writing is stripped down, the emotional force of it is not.

Szalay himself has spoken about the novel emerging from failure. In 2020, he abandoned a project he’d worked on for nearly four years. Flesh, he said, came from wanting to explore life as something experienced physically before intellectually, an existence that begins in the body and radiates outward.

The Booker jury clearly felt that resonance. Among this year’s shortlisted contenders were Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter and Kiran Desai’s first novel since her own Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

For Szalay’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, the win marks its tenth Booker, the most of any imprint in the award’s history. Last year’s winner, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, was also a Cape title.

Born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, Szalay grew up in London. He has lived in Lebanon and the UK, and now lives in Vienna. After graduating from Oxford, he worked as a financial advertising sales executive, which became the inspiration for his debut novel, London and the South-East. He is also the author of the novels Spring and The Innocent, as well as the short story collection Turbulence.

Cover photo via The Booker Prize.