Hungarian-British Author David Szalay Wins The 2025 Booker Prize With ‘Flesh’
David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel ‘Flesh’. Szalay accepted the award from ‘The Commitments’ writer and former winner Roddy Doyle here in London tonight at a glitzy awards bash held at the Old Billingsgate venue.
Reckoned to be the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction, the accolade puts its winning author into a new orbit, with global coverage of the award and a huge boost to book sales. The winner also takes home a £50,000 ($66K) cash prize.
In his acceptance speech Szalay talked about the importance of risk-taking. “Throughout the process of writing the book there was a sense of risks being taken, and I think it’s very important that we did take those risks,” he said. “Fiction can take risks. It can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other narrative forms can’t quite do to the same extent.”
‘Flesh’ is the Hungarian-British writer’s sixth novel and is described as an unconventional rags-to-riches story that follows István from Hungarian housing project to life among Europe’s top earners. It is published by Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner. Ahead of time bookmakers made ‘Flesh’ one of favorites alongside Andrew Miller’s ‘The Land In Winter’ and Kiran Desai‘s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’.
About 20 Booker winning novels have been adapted for the screen including Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’, Thomas Keneally’s ‘Schindler’s Ark’ (published as ‘Schindler’s List’ in the U.S.) and Yann Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’.
In terms of adaptation of Szalay’s work, Gomorrah and ZeroZeroZero writers Leonardo Fasoli and Maddelena Ravagli were tapped back in 2023 to adapt his novel ‘Turbulence’ into a TV series although there has been no update on that project since.
The pre-awards promo now includes a series of high-end short films with star names reading excerpts from the shortlisted books, which Booker releases across its own channels and YouTube. Filmmaker Sasha Nathwani directed this year’s films that counted the likes of Stormzy, Rory Kinnear and Arlo Parks among the talent reading from the books. The 2025 films have racked up over 50M views thus far. Last year’s ended up with over 80M views.
