David Szalay wins 2025 Booker Prize for “Flesh”
David Szalay, the Canadian-Hungarian-British novelist, has won the 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel “Flesh”, a work that peers closely into the quiet mystery of everyday life, revealing how longing, endurance, and strangeness shape what it means to be alive. It is a story that finds meaning not in grandeur, but in the quiet persistence of being.
The novel follows István, a Hungarian man whose life unfolds through an affair with an older woman, years of exile in Britain, and an eventual crossing into London’s high society. Through his journey, Szalay explores identity, class, and the body, turning a single life into a universal meditation on the act of living.
Selected from 153 submitted works, “Flesh” earned the unanimous praise of a jury chaired by Irish novelist Roddy Doyle and featuring actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who described the book as “a novel about living, and the strangeness of living.” The decision, they said, came after five hours of thoughtful discussion that left no doubt about its quiet brilliance.
Doyle noted that István represents a group rarely seen at the heart of literature, working-class men, while Szalay, 51, said he wanted to write about “life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world.”
With this win, Szalay reaffirms the novel’s timeless ability to illuminate the human condition, to turn the ordinary into revelation and the silent into song.