David Szalay wins the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Dark Flesh Booker Prize

Hungarian-British writer David Szalái has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh.

Szalay’s sixth work of fiction follows the life of one man, István, from his youth to middle age. Jury chairman Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993, said the jury had “never read anything like it before. It’s a dark book in many ways, but it’s a joy to read.”

Flesh begins with a horrific incident unfolding as teenager István lives in an apartment complex with his mother in Hungary. Szalay then follows the protagonist as he spends time in the army before moving to London, where he begins working for the wealthy. Written in simple prose, the novel explores masculinity, class, migration, trauma, gender and power.

Szalay was announced as the winner of the £50,000 prize at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London on Monday evening. He was previously shortlisted for the award in 2016, for his novel “All This Man.”

Doyle said the decision to award Salai the award was “unanimous.” He was joined on this year’s panel by actress Sarah Jessica Parker, along with writers Chris Bauer, Ayobami Adepay, and Kelly Reid.

The book is “about a working-class man, who doesn’t usually get a lot of attention,” Doyle said. “He presents us with a certain type of man” and “invites us to look behind the face.”

“Without anyone realizing it, I was raised, like, never to cry,” Doyle said. “I realized it and decided it was nonsense,” but Istvan is “that kind of guy.”

“Zalai has written a novel about the big question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive,” Kieran Goddard wrote in The Guardian’s review of the novel. “Stylistically, the body is all bone. Salai has always been a master of the flinty spare phrase, but in this novel he has pared things down even more brutally.”

Salai’s novel topped the strong shortlist of bookmakers’ favorite Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, and Kiran Desai’s prize-nominated Sonia and Sunny’s Unity, her first novel since winning the Booker Prize for Inheritance of Loss in 2006. Other novels to make the shortlist this year are Flashlight by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura and The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits.

Asked whether any of the other novels had come close to challenging Szalay’s victory, Doyle said, “The answer is somewhat yes,” but declined to name specific titles, saying that would be “unfair, a little harsh.”

Szalay was born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and a Canadian mother, and grew up in London. He has lived in Lebanon and the United Kingdom, and now lives in Vienna. After graduating from Oxford, he worked as a financial advertising sales executive, which became the inspiration for his first novel, London and the South East. He is also the author of the novels Spring and The Innocents, as well as the short story collection Disorder.

Writing in The Guardian over the weekend about his inspiration for Flesh, Salai said the novel was “conceived in the shadow of failure” — in the fall of 2020 he abandoned a novel he had been working on for nearly four years that he felt wasn’t working. He wanted the body to “express in some way the feeling I had that our existence is a physical experience before it is anything else, and that all its other aspects arise from that physicality.”

This is the tenth win for publisher Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin, which has the most wins in the history of the award. Last year’s winning title, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, is also published by Cape.

Other recent winners include “The Prophet’s Song” by Paul Lynch, “The Seven Moons of His Excellency Almeida” by Shehan Karunatilaka, and “The Promise” by Damon Galgut.

• Flesh by David Salai (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support The Guardian, order your copy for £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.