'Honest and heartbreaking' novel wins the Booker prize

Flesh by British-Hungarian author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker prize for fiction.

- ANNABEL NUGENT

Szalay’s novel, which follows the travails of an inscrutable Hungarian man over the decades, was unanimously chosen as the winner after a six-hour discussion, said Irish writer Roddy Doyle, chair of the Booker judging panel and previous recipient of the prestigious award.

“The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the rest of the other great novels was Flesh because of its singularity,” he said. “We had never read anything quite like it.”

Szalay, 51, was presented with the prize by last year’s winner Samantha Harvey at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London last night.

Accepting the award, Szalay said: “There was a sense of risk being taken, and I think it’s very important that we did take these risks.

“Obviously, it’s easy for me to say that now, but I think I felt that all along, because I think fiction can take risks. It can take aesthetic risk, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms, narrative forms, can’t quite do at the same extent.”

Published in March, Flesh follows the monosyllabic István as he navigates awkward boyhood through to melancholic late-middle age. With its minimalist prose and impenetrable protagonist, the book is “hypnotic in its masculine blankness”, wrote