David Szalay wins the 2025 Booker Prize for FLESH

It’s a singular, haunting novel that redefines the art of storytelling and explores the strangeness of being alive

Canadian-Hungarian David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel FLESH. The official statement read- “We, at Penguin Random House India(BHARAT), are delighted to share that Flesh by David Szalay has been named the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction 2025. This novel is the sixth work of fiction by Szalay, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.”

‘There was a sense of risk being taken. And I think it’s very important that we did take those risks. Fiction can take risks - aesthetic, formal or even moral risks. It’s important the novel community embraces risk,’ Szalay said while accepting the prize at a ceremony in London on Monday, 10 November.

About the Winning Book

A spare yet propulsive novel, Flesh follows István, a man whose life is quietly unravelled by forces beyond his control.

At fifteen, he lives with his mother in a small Hungarian town, where an unexpected and illicit relationship sets off a series of events that shape his life in ways he cannot foresee. As he moves from adolescence to old age, from the Hungarian army to the glittering yet hollow world of London’s super-rich, István wrestles with desire, loss, power, and meaning.

A Glimpse into the Book

Flesh opens quietly, with a boy, a move, and a question, and unfolds into something unforgettable:

‘When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts at a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making friends…’

About the Author

David Szalay is the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. Born in Canada, he has lived in Lebanon, the UK, Hungary, and now resides in Vienna.

Szalay is the author of six acclaimed works of fiction that have been translated into more than 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut novel London and the South-East (2008) won both the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes, while All That Man Is was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 and went on to win the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction.