David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize for His Novel Flesh

Hungarian-British author David Szalay has been declared the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh. At a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London, Szalay was declared the winner of the £50,000 prize.

Hungarian-British author David Szalay was declared the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh at a ceremony held in London.

At a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London, Szalay was declared the winner of the £50,000 prize. Earlier, he had been nominated for this award in 2016 for his novel All That Man Is.

He is also the author of the novels Spring and The Innocent, as well as the short story collection Turbulence. Born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and a Canadian mother, Szalay was raised in London.

Other nominated novels

Szalay’s novel topped a strong shortlist that included other favorites Andrew Miller (The Land in Winter) and Kiran Desai (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny), which was her first novel since winning the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss.

Other shortlisted novels this year included Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, and Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives.

Booker Prize

First awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize initially honored works in English from the UK, Ireland, and Commonwealth countries, but in 2014, eligibility was expanded to include any English-language novel published in the UK.

From 2002 to 2019, it was sponsored by Man Group PLC and renamed the “Man Booker Prize,” after which, under a new sponsor, Crankstart, it reverted to its original name.

1969: The prize was first awarded, with P. H. Newby becoming the first winner for his work Something to Answer For.

List of Indian Booker Prize winners

1971 V. S. Naipaul In a Free State

1981 Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children

1997 Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things

2006 Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss

2008 Aravind Adiga The White Tiger

2022 Geetanjali Shree Tomb of Sand (International Booker Prize)

2025 Banu Mushtaq Heart Lamp

Salman Rushdie receives Lifetime Achievement Award of the Dayton Peace Prize

Salman Rushdie was among the honorees at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize ceremony in Ohio, where he was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award for publishing his first fictional work after being stabbed on a lecture stage in New York three years earlier.

The city of Dayton, Ohio, was the site of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords negotiations, which ended a war marked by ethnic cleansing in the Balkans that killed more than 300,000 people and displaced 1 million residents.

The 78-year-old Rushdie is best known for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which faced blasphemy accusations, and in 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for the Indian-born author’s death, forcing him into hiding.

During the 2022 attack, he lost an eye before shocked onlookers, and his attacker—who was not even born when The Satanic Verses was published—was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Rushdie published a highly acclaimed memoir Knife in 2024 about the attack, which has been shortlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His most recent work, his 23rd, The Eleventh Hour, includes three novellas and two short stories.

Previous recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award include former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, genocide survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, and writers Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Barbara Kingsolver, and Studs Terkel.

The Lifetime Achievement Award, also known as the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, is named after the American diplomat who was the architect of the Dayton Peace Accords.

Other honorees this year include Kaveh Akbar for his novel Martyr!—about a poet and the mysterious family past of the son of Iranian immigrants—and Sunil Amrith for The Burning Earth, a history of how empires, wars, and the growing mobility of humanity have shaped the global environment.