British writer of Hungarian descent David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his sixth novel, Flesh, a stark yet luminous meditation on contemporary masculinity and the physical condition of existence.
The jury, chaired by Roddy Doyle, described the book as “dark, yet deeply pleasurable to read,” and announced that the decision had been made unanimously.
Through the life of a single character, Flesh weaves a piercing narrative about manhood, class, migration, and the experience of embodiment in the modern world. The novel opens in Hungary, where young István lives with his mother, before tracing his military service, his migration to London, and the years he spends amid the world of the wealthy.
With a language both spare and precise, Szalay renders the silences, losses, and desires in a man’s life visible. Doyle called the novel “unlike anything else—dark, yet told with such simplicity that turning each page brings a rare sense of satisfaction.”
This year’s jury also included actor Sarah Jessica Parker and writers Chris Power, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, and Kiley Reid, who praised the book for “centering a working-class man and exploring a form of existence often overlooked in literature.”
A Quiet Meditation on the Strangeness of Being
Since its release, Flesh has been met with critical acclaim. The Guardian hailed it as “a brilliant portrait of a man and a haunting exploration of what it means to live,” while The Sunday Times described it as “a spare but shattering depiction of modern man in three distinct phases.”
Roddy Doyle emphasized Szalay’s mastery of restraint: “He conveys grief with just a few blank pages. The absence of dialogue is as eloquent as its presence.” Meanwhile, Booker Prize Foundation CEO Gaby Wood said the jury found the novel “disciplined, honest, painful yet profoundly sincere.”
Szalay revealed that the inspiration for Flesh came in autumn 2020, after abandoning a project he had been working on for four years:
“At that time, I was overcome by a sense of failure, but also by a strong intuition that the body is where everything begins. Flesh grew out of that feeling.”
Born in Canada, raised in London, and now living in Vienna, Szalay deepens both the form and themes explored in his earlier works. His 2016 novel All That Man Is, also shortlisted for the Booker, similarly placed masculinity at its center—making Flesh a more intimate, corporeal continuation of that exploration.
