Hungarian British author David Szalay wins Booker Prize 2025 for his novel Flesh

Hungarian British author David Szalay has won the prestigious Booker Prize, worth £50,000 (NZ$116,713), for his dark but strangely humorous book, Flesh.

The novel charts the life of the taciturn loner István, living in a housing estate in Hungary. His life is shaped by the affair he has as a teenager with his middle-aged neighbour.

Jumping forward in time each chapter, Flesh takes István from his small hometown to the Middle East, where he waits for a flight home after serving in the Iraq War.

He later moves to England, where a job in security leads him to fraternise with the ultra-wealthy. There, he begins to repeat the disruptive patterns of his youth, experiencing riches, and grief, he's never known before.

First shortlisted for the Booker in 2016 for a collection of linked stories, All That Man Is, Szalay this year bested American authors Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura and Ben Markovits; English author Andrew Miller, who was shortlisted in 2001; and the 2006 winner, Indian author Kiran Desai.

Chair of the Booker judges, author Roddy Doyle, a past winner himself, announced Szalay as the winner at a ceremony in London on Monday night, UK time.

Accepting the award, Szalay said it felt "risky" to write Flesh.

"I think fiction can take risks … It can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms can't quite do to the same extent.

"Part of the reason for that is just novels are relatively cheap to produce - all you need to do is keep one writer supplied with coffee and a few other essentials for a year or two and you've got a novel."

In a statement, Doyle praised Flesh for its distinctiveness: "[The judges] had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read."

"The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter," he said.

"The book is about living, and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we're glad we're alive and reading — experiencing — this extraordinary, singular novel."

In their report, the judges — including Sex and the City actor Sarah Jessica Parker — praised Flesh as "hypnotically tense and compelling … an astonishingly moving portrait of a man's life".

In 2020, Szalay gave up on the book he had been writing for almost four years. It made him determined to finish his next book, which would become Flesh.

"You might be able to abandon one book, but you can't abandon two books in a row; then it starts to look like a real problem," Szalay told ABC Radio National's The Book Show earlier this month.

"This one had to work."

Starting on Flesh, Szalay knew he wanted to set it in both Hungary and England, the two countries where he divided his time.

The son of a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, he was born in Canada but grew up in London, and moved to Hungary in 2009 to make space to write.

"London is very much the place that I still think of as home," he explains. "But by that point I'd been living in Hungary for many years.

"I reached a point where I wasn't entirely at home in either place, in a funny way.

"I wanted to somehow write a book that reflected that and somehow made a virtue of that aspect of my life at the time."

In Flesh, a violent act changes the course of István's life. It stems from his affair with his neighbour.

The relationship and violence, Szalay says, influences his character's emotional life and sets the narrative in motion.

"I didn't want to shy away from extremes of experience," Szalay says. "Most people's lives include something of that, and those tend to be very important to people's experiences and to the shape and nature of their lives.

"I just wanted to see how far that could be taken."

Szalay sees Flesh as a "physical" book. It is rooted in the confusion of teenage desire; as István ages, the reader is exposed to his continued, sometimes troubling, feelings of lust, but also his emotional estrangement from other people.

"The book itself looks at István and the other characters first of all as sort of physical bodies," Szalay says.

István's physicality, including his perceptions of the natural world, is in contrast with the sparsity of the dialogue; the word "Okay" is perhaps the one he says most.

"'Okay' can mean a wide range of different things in different contexts," Szalay says.

He wanted his dialogue to be "almost bloody-mindedly realistic".

"It's just the repetitions and circularities and non-meaningful grunts that constitute a lot of real dialogue between people," he explains.

"It's part of the book's realism, and the engagement which the reader has with István is partly based on a very real, very strong sense of his reality and the reality of his world.

"I'm amazed how much can be communicated by that sort of dialogue; the extreme subtleties, which the reader will understand on some level."

Those subtleties captured the attention of Doyle and his fellow judges.

"When you see [the dialogue] presented, it is so real and it becomes so brilliant that you actually feel almost affectionate towards it," Doyle tells ABC Arts.

"[István] is a man of few words. [That] didn't do Clint Eastwood's career any harm.

"He is not Clint Eastwood or anything like him, but he says very little and you learn so much."