Flesh by David Szalay was named the winner of the Booker Prize 2025 at a ceremony in London on Monday, 10 November. Szalay receives £50,000 and a trophy, which was presented to him by last year’s winner, Samantha Harvey.

Flesh was selected as the winning book by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, the first Booker Prize winner to chair a Booker judging panel. Doyle was joined by fellow judges Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid. They considered 153 books and were looking for the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.  

Written in spare prose, and spanning decades – from a Hungarian housing estate to the mansions of London’s rich elite – Flesh is a propulsive novel centred on an emotionally detached man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. The novel is the sixth work of fiction by David Szalay, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.

(https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2025)