Author David Szalay, left, with Booker Prize 2025 jury chair Roddy Doyle at the Billingsgate award ceremony in London. Image: Booker Prizes, David Parry
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Singularity’
With David Szalay having won the 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom overnight for Flesh (Penguin Random House / Jonathan Cape), he is £50,000 (US$65,855) wealthier and now ready to watch for the kind of sales impact that can result from a win in this most influential of English-language awards.
Each of the six authors shortlisted also receives £2,500 (US$3,292) and a specially bound edition of her or his book.
The six books in the shortlist this evening (November 10) at London’s Old Billingsgate facility for the 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom have been drawn from that initial pool of 153 submitted titles, as we reported in our longlist coverage on July 29, and then in the 13 longlisted entries in July, which we will repeat for you below in this article.
David Szalay was nominated once before, in 2016, and has said about Flesh that it’s a book in which he “wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world.” He is Hungarian-British, and his winning work is being called “an extraordinary, singular, novel … a dark book that is a joy to read” by the 2025 Booker jury chair, Roddy Doyle.
Roddy Doyle
In his rationale for the jury’s decision, Doyle said, “The judges discussed the six books on the shortlist for more than five hours. The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the other great novels, was Flesh – because of its singularity. We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read.
“At the end of the novel, we don’t know what the protagonist, István, looks like but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it’s the absence of words–or the absence of István’s words–that allow us to know István. Early in the book, we know that he cries because the person he’s with tells him not to; later in life, we know he’s balding because he envies another man’s hair; we know he grieves because, for several pages, there are no words at all.
“I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well.
“It’s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe–almost to create–the character with him. The writing is spare and that is its great strength.
“Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading–experiencing–this extraordinary, singular novel.”
And Gaby Wood, CEO of the Booker Prize Foundation, says, “When the five jurors took their places at the winner meeting, in the same room in Fortnum & Mason where they had first met in early February, they sat in the same seats.
“And they reflected, not only on the circularity of that moment after nine months of reading together, but on the curious fact that they had discussed half of the books that ended up on their shortlist that very first day. Those set a high standard, and by the end of the process the jurors were so loath to part company with any of the six that they kept talking for five hours.
Gaby Wood. Image: David Parry
“Flesh was among the books they had discussed on day one. The jurors returned to it, again and again, and felt more invested in it every time. After a third reading, they struggled to think of another writer whose work they could compare it to. They found it spare, disciplined, urgent, honest and heartbreaking. With Flesh, they all agreed, David Szalay breaks new ground.
“I share the jurors’ excitement over the work of an author who has been writing with ferocious and stark commitment for many years.”
Here is a quick look once more for you at the shortlist in the 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction.
The 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction Shortlist
| Author | Author Nationality, as provided by the publisher | Title | UK and/or Irish Publisher / Imprint |
| Susan Choi | American | Flashlight | Penguin Random House / Jonathan Cape |
| Kiran Desai | Indian | The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny | Penguin Random House / Hamish Hamilton |
| Katie Kitamura | American | Audition | Penguin Random House / Fern Press |
| Ben Markovits | American | The Rest of Our Lives | Faber |
| Andrew Miller | British | The Land in Winter | Hachette / Hodder & Stoughton / Sceptre |
| David Szalay | Hungarian-British | Flesh | Penguin Random House / Jonathan Cape |
Penguin Random House’s Jonathan Cape
Becomes the Leading Winner of Booker Prizes
Szalay is not the only writer of Hungarian heritage to have won the Booker or International Booker Prize: László Krasznahorkai, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, won the International Booker Prize in 2015. He became the fifth International Booker Prize-nominated author–along with Han Kang, Jon Fosse, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk–to go on to win the Nobel.
Flesh’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, has published the most Booker Prize winners in the history of the prize, with nine previous Booker winners: in 1974 (The Conservationist), 1976 (Saville), 1981 (Midnight’s Children), 1984 (Hotel du Lac), 1991 (The Famished Road), 1998 (Amsterdam), 2007 (The Gathering), 2011 (The Sense of an Ending) and 2024 (Orbital).
Standing with their winner, David Szalay, at center, the jurors in the Booker Prize for Fiction’s 2025 award cycle are, from left, Sarah Jessica Parker; Chris Power; Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Kiley Reid; chair Roddy Doyle. Image: The Booker Prizes, David Parry
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Booker Prize for Fiction is here. More on the International Booker Prize is here, more from Publishing Perspectives on both Booker Prize programs is here. And more from us on the international industry’s many book and publishing awards programs overall is here.
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