David Szalay wins Booker Prize for his novel Flesh

Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has won the prestigious Booker prize for his caller Flesh, which tells the communicative of a tortured Hungarian emigre who makes and loses a fortune.

Szalay, 51, bushed 5 different shortlisted authors, including Indian novelist Kiran Desai and the United Kingdom’s Andrew Miller, to assertion the 50,000 British lb ($65,500) grant astatine a ceremonial successful London connected Monday.

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Written successful spare prose, Slazay’s publication recounts the beingness of taciturn Istvan, from a teenage narration with an older pistillate done clip arsenic a struggling migrant successful the UK to a denizen of London precocious society.

“A meditation connected class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity, Flesh is simply a compelling representation of 1 man, and the formative experiences that tin reverberate crossed a lifetime,” organisers of the grant ceremonial successful London said successful a statement.

Accepting his trophy astatine London’s Old Billingsgate, Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his “risky” novel.

He recalled asking his exertion “whether she could ideate a caller called ‘Flesh’ winning the Booker Prize”.

“You person your answer,” helium said.

In summation to the 50,000-pound ($67,000) prize for the winner, arsenic good arsenic 2,500-pound awards to each of the shortlisted authors and translators, the writers besides summation a boost successful popularity and payment from accrued publication sales.

Szalay’s publication was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging sheet that included Irish writer Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City histrion Sarah Jessica Parker.

Doyle said that Flesh, a publication “about living, and the strangeness of living”, emerged arsenic the judges’ unanimous prime aft a five-hour meeting.

“We had ne'er work thing rather similar it. It is, successful galore ways, a acheronian publication but it is simply a joyousness to read,” said Doyle successful a statement.

“I don’t deliberation I’ve work a caller that uses the achromatic abstraction connected the leafage truthful well. It’s arsenic if the writer … is inviting the scholar to capable the space, to observe – astir to make – the quality with him.”

Booker Prize 2025 victor David Szalay, writer of Flesh, poses with judges Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Power, Ayobami Adebayo, Kiley Reid and Roddy Doyle during The Booker Prize 2025 ceremonial astatine Old Billingsgate successful London, UK [Eamonn M McCormack/Getty Images]

Szalay, who was calved successful Canada, raised successful the UK and lives successful Vienna, was antecedently a Booker finalist successful 2016 for All That Man Is, a bid of stories astir 9 wildly antithetic men.

Flesh was Szalay’s sixth enactment of fiction.

“Even though my begetter is Hungarian, I ne'er felt wholly astatine location successful Hungary. I suppose, I’m ever a spot of an outsider there, and surviving distant from the UK and London for truthful galore years, I besides had a akin feeling astir London,” Szalay told BBC Radio.

“I truly wanted to constitute a publication that stretched betwixt Hungary and London and progressive a quality who was not rather astatine location successful either place.”

The frontrunners for this year’s prize, according to betting markets, were Miller for his early-1960s home play The Land successful Winter, and Desai for the globe-spanning saga The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her archetypal caller since The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize successful 2006.

The different finalists were Susan Choi’s twisty household saga, Flashlight; Katie Kitamura’s communicative of acting and identity, Audition; and Ben Markovits’s midlife-crisis roadworthy trip, The Rest of Our Lives.

The Booker Prize was founded successful 1969 and has established a estimation for transforming writers’ careers.

Its winners person included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who took the 2024 prize for abstraction presumption story, Orbital.

The abstracted class of the International Booker Prize was awarded successful May to Indian writer and activistic Banu Mushtaq for her novel, Heart Lamp, which tells 12 stories of the mundane lives of women and girls successful Muslim communities successful confederate India.