Writer David Szalay wins prestigious
Booker Prize for fiction with his earthy novel 'Flesh'
[November 11, 2025]
By JILL LAWLESS
LONDON (AP) — Canadian-Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won
the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “Flesh,” the story of one
man's life from working-class origins in Hungary to mega-wealth in
Britain, in which what isn’t on the page is just as important as what
is.
Szalay, 51, beat five other finalists, including favorites Andrew Miller
of Britain and Indian author Kiran Desai, to take the coveted literary
award, which brings a 50,000-pound ($66,000) payday and a big boost to
the winner’s sales and profile.
He was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that included
Irish writer Roddy Doyle and “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica
Parker.
Doyle said “Flesh” — a book “about living, and the strangeness of
living” — emerged as the judges’ unanimous choice after a five-hour
meeting.
Szalay’s book recounts in spare, unadorned style the life of taciturn
István, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as
a struggling immigrant in Britain to unlikely denizen of London high
society.
Szalay said he wrote “Flesh” under pressure, after abandoning a novel
he'd been working on for four years.
He said the story grew from “simple, fundamental ingredients.” He knew
he "wanted a book that was partly Hungarian and partly English” and was
about “life as a physical experience.”
Accepting his trophy at London's Old Billingsgate — a former fish market
turned glitzy events venue — Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his
“risky” novel.
He recalled asking his editor “whether she could imagine a novel called
‘Flesh’ winning the Booker Prize.”
“You have your answer," he said.
Doyle, who chaired the judges, said István belongs to a group overlooked
in fiction: a working-class man. He said that since reading it, he looks
more closely when he walks past bouncers standing in the doorways of
Dublin pubs.
“I’m kind of giving him a second look, because I feel I might know him a
bit better,” said Doyle, whose funny, poignant stories of working-class
Dublin life won him the 1993 Booker Prize for “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.”
“It presents us with a certain type of man that invites us to look
behind the face.”
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Hungarian-British author David Szalay poses for photographers with
the trophy after winning the Booker Prize 2025 for his book 'Flesh'
during a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, Monday, Nov. 10,
2025. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
 Szalay, who was born in Montreal to
a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, raised in the U.K. and now
lives in Vienna, was previously a Booker finalist in 2016 for “All
That Man Is,” a series of stories about nine wildly different men.
“Flesh” was praised by many critics but frustrated others with its
refusal to fill in the gaps in István’s story – great swathes of
life, including incarceration and wartime service in Iraq, occur off
the page – and its stubbornly unexpressive central character, whose
most common remark is “Okay.”
“He is quite an opaque character," Szalay acknowledged at a news
conference. "He doesn’t explain himself to the reader. He isn’t very
articulate. So I really didn’t know quite how people would respond
to him as a character.”
Doyle said the judges “loved the spareness of the writing.”
“We loved how so much was revealed without us being overly aware
that it was being revealed. … Watching this man grow, age, and
learning so much about him – despite him, in a way," he said. “If
the gaps were filled, it would be less of a book.”
Founded in 1969 and open to English-language novels from around the
world, the Booker Prize has established a reputation for
transforming writers’ careers. Winners have included Salman Rushdie,
Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who
took the 2024 prize for space station story “Orbital."
Szalay said he hadn't thought about what he will do with his prize
money, beyond "going on a nice little holiday with a bit of it and
put the rest in the bank.”
Last year's winner Harvey, who handed Szalay the Booker Prize
trophy, had some advice.
“Buckle up, and get a good accountant,” she said.
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