David Szalay's 'Flesh' is Winner of 2025 Booker Prize
New Delhi: The book Flesh by David Szalay was named the winner of the Booker Prize 2025 on November 10.
Szalay is the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. This has been a noteworthy year for Hungary in literature, with Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai winning the Nobel for literature as well.
Szalay got £50,000 in prize money and a trophy, which was presented to him by last year’s winner, Samantha Harvey.
This year's shortlist had The Land in Winter, The Rest of Our Lives, Audition, Flashlight, and of special interest for India, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Booker veteran Kiran Desai.
The 2025 judging panel was chaired by 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-longlisted novelists Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and Kiley Reid, actor Sarah Jessica Parker, and writer and literary critic Chris Power. They considered 153 books by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1 2024 and September 30, 2025.
The Booker website describes Flesh as a spare but propulsive novel, which follows a man from adolescence to old age as he is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Written in spare prose, and spanning decades – from a Hungarian housing estate to the mansions of London’s rich elite – Flesh is the sixth work of fiction by David Szalay, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.
"Flesh asks profound questions about what drives a life, what makes it worth living, and what breaks it," the Booker website says.
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