Flesh by David Szalay wins the Booker Prize 2025

We’re thrilled to share that Flesh by David Szalay has been named winner of the Booker Prize 2025.

Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to writers worldwide and honours ‘the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. To win is a huge honour, not only granting the winning author £50,000 and a trophy, but also the prestige of being named a Booker Prize-winner and exposure to readers around the world.

Of Flesh, Roddy Doyle, Chair of judges said:

'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.'

About Flesh

Flesh by David Szalay

Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025

We’d also like to extend a huge congratulations to Katie Kitamura, Kiran Desai and Susan Choi, who made this year’s shortlist for their respective books, Audition, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Flashlight.