2025 Booker Prize Goes to David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’

When David Szalay’s novel “All That Man Is” was nominated for the 2016 Booker Prize, the author described the award ceremony as “a horrible experience.”

He sat through a “very stressful” dinner, wondering whether his book would triumph, only for it to lose to Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout.” He later told The Guardian newspaper, “Only trauma imprints memories that clearly.”

On Monday night in London, Szalay sat through another Booker Prize dinner. But this time his latest novel, “Flesh,” won the prestigious literary award.

The author Roddy Doyle, who chaired this year’s judging panel, called it a “singular” and “extraordinary” novel.

“It’s just not like any other book,” Doyle told a news conference before Monday’s announcement about the novel, in which Istvan, a lonely Hungarian teenager, makes an unexpected rise to the height of British society. The sparseness of Szalay’s writing compels readers to “climb into the novel and be involved,” Doyle added.

Accepting the award, Szalay said that “Flesh” wasn’t easy to write, “and I didn’t always cope that well with the pressure. I didn’t cope that wisely or graciously.”

Szalay then thanked his wife for supporting him. “I’m sure she is bewildered as I am by the fact that those rather bleak times and this glittering evening are somehow part of the same process and same experience.”

“Flesh” beat the five other shortlisted titles, including Susan Choi’s “Flashlight,” Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” Katie Kitamura’s “Audition,” Ben Markovits’s “The Rest of Our Lives” and Andrew Miller’s “The Land in Winter.”

One of literature’s pre-eminent awards, the Booker Prize is given each year to the book deemed to be best novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. Last year, Samantha Harvey triumphed with “Orbital,” a novel set aboard the International Space Station. In recent years, the Booker has acquired a global following, and winning titles often become hits on both sides of the Atlantic. As well as a boost in sales, the winning author receives a cash prize of 50,000 pounds, about $65,800.

“Flesh” has attracted a host of high-profile admirers since its publication in March, including the pop star Dua Lipa, who chose the novel for her book club, and the novelist Zadie Smith, who told a BBC radio show that “Flesh” was “astonishing.” Some novelists give their characters incredibly complicated inner lives, Smith said, but Szalay had the confidence to create a lead who doesn’t reflect much on the events that befall him, and who felt realistic because of that.

“Sometimes when I’m reading, one of the things I’m looking for is, ‘How has this person made the novel new?’” Smith said: “For me, this novel was new.”

Reviewers also praised the book, even when they had quibbles. Dwight Garner, writing in The New York Times, said that he admired “Flesh” “from front to back without ever quite liking it, without ever quite giving into it.” But Luke Brown, in The Financial Times, called the book “refreshing, illuminating and true” for its portrait of a man who has stints as a soldier, security guard and property developer.

Szalay, 51, whose name is pronounced SOL-loy, is the author of five previous books. Those include his 2008 debut, “London and the South-East,” about a sales executive who ends up stocking shelves in a grocery store; “Turbulence,” a series of interconnected stories in which all of the characters take flights; and “All That Man Is,” about men in various states of duress.

One aspect of “Flesh” that reviewers praised is its sparse and at times funny dialogue, particularly Istvan’s frequent use of the word “Okay” to respond to questions.

At Monday’s news conference, Doyle said the judges considered such dialogue to be part of the book’s appeal. Istvan was an old-school male, brought up not to cry and to be “a man of few words,” Doyle added — comparing him to characters in westerns. And it “didn’t do Clint Eastwood’s career any harm,” Doyle said.

“If you were dealing with a real-life person trying to have a decent conversation with them, it would frustrate you somewhat,” Doyle said. “But when it’s presented on the page, to be honest, I found it riveting.”

In ​a recent interview with Dua Lipa, Szalay discussed “Flesh” in depth​, including Istvan’s passive response to outside forces, which Szalay said ​he considered realistic.

“We’re all acted on by life in ways that we can’t control,” he said.

​That includes, as Monday’s Booker Prize dinner no doubt reminded him, literary awards, too.