The Canadian-born British-Hungarian writer David Szalay has tonight won the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, beating five other novels on the shortlist by such distinguished authors as Kiran Desai, a previous winner, and Andrew Miller, who has been on the shortlist before.
He was awarded the Booker trophy and a £50,000 cash prize at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London.
Describing Flesh, chair of the judges Roddy Doyle, himself the winner of the 1993 Booker Prize, said: “The book is about living, and the strangeness of living,” adding that “as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading – experiencing – this extraordinary, singular novel.”
Flesh is a novel about the unravelling of the life of a Hungarian man called István; it begins in a housing estate in Hungary and arrives in the mansions of the super-rich in London. It’s an international novel with a pan-European flavour, in the vein of previous writings by Szalay – who has lived between Austria, Hungary and Britain in recent years.
Speaking to the Booker Prizes website about the inspiration for Flesh, Szalay said: “I knew I 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. It would be, to some extent, a novel about contemporary Europe, and about the cultural and economic divides that characterise it.”
Flesh also continues Szalay’s exploration of the theme of masculinity, which he announced so clearly in All That Man Is, his book of intertwined, transcontinental short stories that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. “My aim was to try to be as honest as possible about what it’s actually like to be a male body in the world,” Szalay told the Guardian earlier this year.
The New Statesman’s reviewer Sydney Diack noted the “pared-back narration and monosyllabic dialogue” as reflections of the way “an exploitative society fosters uncommunicative, unmoored men”.
I first read Szalay’s work just after I left school. Szalay’s debut novel London and the South-East came out in 2008 and told the story of a depressed, drunken telesales worker bored of office life. It was a wonderful comic novel that was viciously funny about the world of work that seemed to await me – and, as I would soon learn, it was largely correct about it too. The novel was garlanded with awards, including The Betty Trask and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
But it would not be until All That Man Is that Szalay achieved a degree of fame. At a certain point in 2016, after the Brexit vote, with Britain’s exit from the European Union on everyone’s minds, it seemed that almost everyone was reading this psychologically penetrating account of the European everyman.
It would not have surprised me at all to be told back then that Szalay would one day win the Booker Prize. It’s an award that has the air of inevitability about it – and Szalay is one of the more justly deserved laureates of the past decade.
[Further reading: From Manya Wilkinson to David Szalay: new books reviewed in short]
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