The Booker Prize, awarded for fiction in English since 1969, named David Szalay's Flesh its 2025 winner at Old Billingsgate, with Roddy Doyle chairing the jury.
The Booker Prize named its 2025 winner at Old Billingsgate in the City of London on Monday 10 November, when David Szalay’s Flesh took the prize before a jury chaired by Roddy Doyle.
The Booker Prize was founded in Britain in 1969, and the Booker Prize Foundation, a charity, has run it since 2002. Since 2014 it has been open to any novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, whatever the author’s nationality. A panel of five judges reads the year’s submissions afresh each time, with no continuity from one jury to the next, and the winner receives £50,000.
That annual reset gives each result its own character. In 2025 the panel read 153 books under Roddy Doyle, who won in 1993 and was the first winner to chair a jury. Sarah Jessica Parker, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Chris Power and Kiley Reid sat beside him.
Susan Choi, Kiran Desai, Katie Kitamura, Ben Markovits and Andrew Miller made up the rest of the shortlist. Szalay, shortlisted once before in 2016, became the first Hungarian-British author to win, for a spare novel that follows a detached man from a Hungarian housing estate to the mansions of London’s rich elite. Samantha Harvey, the 2024 winner, presented the trophy, Penelope Lively gave the keynote, and the ceremony went out live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.