David Szalay Wins the 2025 Booker Prize for the Book ‘Flesh’
After rigorous selection, the Booker Prize Foundation announced Flesh by David Szalay as the winner of the 2925 Booker Prize.
Flesh follows the life of a man from adolescence to old age. It is described as rare and refreshing, and ‘a disquisition on the art of being alive, and all the affliction that comes along with it’. The book tells the story of what it means to be alive, and what it is worth.
It starts with fifteen-year-old István living with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. At first, he is 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. This encounter shifts into a clandestine relationship that István barely understands, and his life soon spirals out of control.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the 21st 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.
Who is David Szalay, the Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize?
David Szalay has authored six works of fiction, which have been translated into over 20 languages. He is currently the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. According to him, Flesh was written because he wanted to write a book with a Hungarian end and an English end.
‘Since I was living very much between the two countries at the time and felt that that needed to be reflected in my choice of subject’.
He also wanted to write about life as a physical experience. About what it’s like to be a living body in the world.
David Szalay receives £50,000 and a Booker Prize trophy, presented to him by the 2024 Booker Prize Winner, Samantha Harvey.
