Booker Prize 2025: British-Hungarian author David Szalay wins the prestigious literary prize with "Flesh".

The Booker Prize, a prestigious literary prize that rewards works of fiction in English, was awarded to the British-Hungarian David Szalay, for his sixth novel Flesh , at a ceremony in London on Monday evening, November 10.

He is the first British-Hungarian author to receive this prestigious award, the equivalent of the French Goncourt Prize, which comes with a prize of £50,000 (€56,800). Born in 1974, he succeeds British author Samantha Harvey, who won the prize in 2024 for Orbital , a lyrical short story that follows six astronauts aboard a space station.

“It’s quite a risky book; I felt like I was taking a risk writing it,” he said on stage, after searching for his words for several seconds. Visibly moved, he explained that he had embarked on writing this novel right after abandoning another literary project. “I felt a lot of pressure because I really wanted this one to be a success,” he added. An excerpt from the book, performed by the rapper Stormzy, was shown during the ceremony.

Described as a singular work by jury president Roddy Doyle, the Irishman who won the prize in 1993, Flesh traces the life of István, a Hungarian man, from his troubled adolescence in his native country to his return there in old age, with the majority of the story taking place in London, where he has emigrated. This finely crafted text follows in the footsteps of one of his previous works, All That Man Is , published in French in 2018 under the title Ce qu'est l'homme (Albin Michel). A critical success, it was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize.

Flesh offers a glimpse into the life of an ordinary man and the torments he faces. Its author stated that he wanted to write "about life as a physical experience, about what it means to be a living body in the world." Awarded since 1969, the Booker Prize has contributed to the success of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and Arundhati Roy. It also promises international renown and, consequently, bestseller status.

The writer, who now lives in Vienna, emerged victorious after a selection process that gave pride of place to established authors, three of whom had already been finalists for the prestigious prize.

He especially defied the predictions that favored the Indian author Kiran Desai and her impressive family saga, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny . The author, who spent twenty years writing this new work, had already made her mark in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss ( La Perte en héritage ), published in French.

The other major contender was the British author Andrew Miller with The Land in Winter , a text that takes the reader back to the 1960s, to the English countryside where snowstorms rage and the lives of two couples are turned upside down.

American author Susan Choi, known for her novel Flashlight, also went home empty-handed. Her book tells the story of a family whose lives are turned upside down when Serk, a Korean man born and raised in Japan who later moved to the United States, disappears on a Japanese beach with his ten-year-old daughter, Louisa.