David Szalay Wins Booker Prize 2025 For 'Flesh', Edging Out Kiran Desai’s 'The Loneliness Of Sonia and Sunny'

Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh, edging out Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny at a ceremony in London on Monday night, PTI reported.

Szalay, 51, received a £50,000 prize and a trophy from last year’s winner Samantha Harvey. His novel follows an emotionally withdrawn man whose life begins to unravel through a chain of events beyond his control.

“Using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life,” the Booker Prize judges said of their chosen winner.

Desai, who won the Booker in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, missed the chance to become only the fifth writer in the award’s 56-year history to claim the prize twice.

Explaining her new work, Desai said she aimed “to write a book about global loneliness through the lens of a long, unresolved love story.” She added, “I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty. In the past of my parents, and certainly my grandparents, an Indian love story would mostly be rooted in one community, one class, one religion, and often also one place. But a love story in today’s globalised world would likely wander in so many different directions.”

At 667 pages, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was described by the judges as “an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity,” centring on two young Indians, Sonia and Sunny. The panel called it “an intimate and expansive epic about two people finding a pathway to love and each other. Rich in meditations about class, race and nationhood, this book has it all.” They also commended Desai’s writing, noting, “The writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny.”

In the end, Flesh was announced as the winner at the event held at Old Billingsgate in London. “What we particularly liked about Flesh was its singularity. It's just not like any other book. It's a dark book, but we all found it a joy to read,” said Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, chair of the 2025 Booker Prize judging panel.

The shortlist also included Flashlight by American-Korean author Susan Choi, Audition by American-Japanese writer Katie Kitamura, The Rest of Our Lives by British-American novelist Ben Markovits, and The Land in Winter by English author Andrew Miller. Each shortlisted writer will receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.

“The six have, I think, two big things in common,” Doyle said. “Their authors are in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise; they have each crafted a novel that no one else could have written.”

He added, “And all of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with – to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from – other people. In other words, they are all brilliantly written and they are all brilliantly human.”

The judging panel also included Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, actor and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, writer and critic Chris Power, and Booker-longlisted author Kiley Reid, PTI reported.

(With inputs from PTI)