David Szalay received the £50,000 Booker Prize for his book Flesh at an award ceremony in London on Monday evening.Ian West/The Associated Press
Canadian-born author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh, a dark story about a Hungarian man from a working-class background whose life slowly unravels after he reaches the top of society in London.
Mr. Szalay, 51, was born in Montreal to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father. The family moved to Beirut when Mr. Szalay was an infant and then left for London a year later when the Lebanese civil war broke out. He now lives in Vienna.
He received the £50,000 prize, about $93,400, at an award ceremony in London Monday evening.
“I felt Flesh is quite a risky novel, a risky book. It felt risky to me writing it,” Mr. Szalay said after receiving the award. “I think it’s very important that we did take those risks. I mean, obviously it’s easy for me to say that now, but I felt that all along because I think fiction can take risks. It can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms, narrative forms, can’t quite do to the same extent.”
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Flesh won out over five other short-listed books: Flashlight by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura and The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits – all from the U.S. – as well as The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Indian author Kiran Desai and The Land in Winter by British author Andrew Miller.
Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who chaired the five-member jury, said the judges debated for more than five hours and Flesh emerged as the unanimous choice.
“We didn’t need a formal vote. I didn’t ask for a show of hands. It was very clear that this was the book that all five of us liked more,” he told reporters on Monday. “It’s the one we admired most.”
Using sparse prose, Flesh tells a story of love and longing through the life of István who rises from a poor neighbourhood in Hungary to the mansions of London. Along the way, István serves time in youth detention, joins the Hungarian army, and enters the world of the super-rich after landing a job as a driver for a British businessman and then having an affair with his wife.
On Monday, Mr. Szalay said he wasn’t sure how readers would respond to the book. “I think partly because István is such an opaque character. He doesn’t explain himself to the reader. He isn’t very articulate,” he said during a press conference after the ceremony. “Even though we are kind of kept from his inner life more than would be typical of a protagonist in this kind of novel, I hope by the end that the reader has a feeling for him.”
He added that he felt pressure while writing the novel because he had abandoned another book. “And so, it was probably the greatest pressure I felt as a writer, actually, because I really felt that this one had to succeed in a way I haven’t felt before,” he said.
Flesh is Mr. Szalay’s sixth novel and he made the Booker Prize short list in 2016 for All That Man Is. On Monday he recalled the stress of waiting to hear the announcement of the winner during the 2016 gala.
“I did a much better job this evening than nine years ago of persuading myself that I definitely wasn’t going to win, so as not to go through the same stressful experience again,” he said. “And then, of course, it was very confusing to actually win and I’m still trying to sort of catch up in my head. But it was altogether a much more pleasant experience.”
From left: Ben Markovits with his book The Rest of Our Lives, Katie Kitamura with her book Audition, Susan Choi with her book Flashlight, Szalay with his book Flesh, Andrew Miller with his book The Land in Winter and Kiran Desai with her book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, in London on Sunday.CHRIS J RATCLIFFE/AFP/Getty Images
While he was officially recognized as a British Hungarian winner, Mr. Szalay said he has a strong connection to Canada. He has Canadian relatives and recalls making regular trips to the country as a child.
“I feel Canadian in a very real way,” he said. “Of course, I have lived my whole life in Europe, more or less since leaving Canada at the age of one or two years old. But my connection to Canada isn’t just something on paper. It’s very real.”
The Booker Prize was founded in 1969, and it is open to authors from anywhere in the world, writing in English, and published in Britain or Ireland. Previous winners have included Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood, who has won it twice.
The Booker Prize Foundation, which manages the award, is launching a Children’s Booker Prize next year to celebrate children’s literature and encourage more young people to read. The prize will be open to authors worldwide for works written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. Books translated into English will also be eligible.
The winner will receive £50,000 and a panel of judges composed of three children and three adults will select the winning entry.