Kiran Desai misses out, Flesh by David Szalay takes the Booker

Within weeks, two of the most coveted literary crowns — the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize — now rest on Hungarian heads.

László Krasznahorkai, the reclusive visionary of despair, claimed the Nobel for his haunting explorations of spiritual collapse. And tonight in London’s Old Billingsgate, David Szalay won the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, his stark and unsettling study of modern masculinity.

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David Szalay, winner of the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, was born in Canada, grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. He is the author of six works of fiction, translated into more than 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut, London and the South-East, won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. All That Man Is received the Gordon Burn Prize and the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. He was selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and appeared on the Telegraph’s top 20 British writers under 40 in 2010.

A standing ovation fills the auditorium in London as David Szalay was named the 2025 Booker Prize winner for his novel Flesh. The Hungarian-British author accepted the award with humility and a smile that betrayed his disbelief.

The winner is Flesh by David Szalay.

After the two judges said their bit, we treated to a short jazz interlude. Stay tuned...

The Booker Prize 2025 ceremony has begun.

Stay tuned as we bring you real-time updates, reactions, and the winner announcement. Will Kiran Desai make history as a two-time winner, or will Andrew Miller, fresh off his Walter Scott Prize win, take the crown? Follow along here for every moment from red carpet arrivals to the final reveal.

The livestream to announce the winner will begin in a few minutes. Stay tuned!

Sound advice from Lennie James.

Another bit of trivia as we await the results. Digital submissions replaced print copies in 2020, simplifying the process for global publishers. Online judging also began during the Covid period. The virtual meetings of that year’s panel produced Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain as winner, a decision reached entirely via video conference.

The prize will be announced at 3 am IST (9.30 pm GMT). Six books have made to the shortlist:

📌 David Szalay’s Flesh,

📌British writer Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter,

📌American novelist Susan Choi’s Flashlight,

📌American writer Katie Kitamura’s Audition,

📌Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,

📌The Rest of Our Lives by British-American writer Ben Markovits.

Keri Hulme, winner in 1985 for The Bone People, thanked only her publisher and left the stage. Her briefness contrasted with later years’ lengthy tributes. Hulme was the first New Zealander to win, and her silence matched her reclusive career.

Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) is often cited as the briefest Booker winner at around 190 pages. Its victory divided critics; some called it minor McEwan, others admired its economy. The episode illustrates that the Booker occasionally rewards precision over scale.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) changed both the prize and the novel’s possibilities. Its fusion of politics, magic, and Indian English style made it an instant classic. It later won the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of Booker (2008). Rushdie’s success confirmed that the prize could reward linguistic risk, not just realism.

John Berger’s G won in 1972, but his acceptance speech eclipsed the novel. Berger denounced Booker McConnell’s colonial profits and donated half his prize money to the British Black Panther Movement. It was the first open political moment in the ceremony and set a pattern for later years: the Booker as both literary platform and public conscience.

Roddy Doyle, Chair of Judges, is in the house! The acclaimed author says that serving as Chair has reminded him of his 14 years as a secondary school teacher, ensuring that everyone gets their turn to speak.

Judges are appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation’s advisory committee. Each panel includes a mix of a novelist, a critic, an academic, and sometimes a public figure or journalist. They serve for one year only, preventing institutional bias. Meetings usually begin in February, with long-list discussions by mid-year and the final deliberation in October or November. The emphasis is on independence; even sponsors have no access to drafts or votes.

The first Booker cheque in 1969 was £5,000. By the 1980s it had risen to £20,000, and since the Man Group era it has stayed near £50,000. The Foundation also gives £2,500 to each shortlisted author. The consistency of this figure has helped stabilise the prize’s profile even as sponsorships changed. For many writers, the monetary award is less significant than the sales spike that follows within days of the announcement.

In 2019, the judges broke their own rule against joint winners, naming both Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. It was the first time a Black British woman won the Booker and the first shared decision in nearly three decades. The Booker Foundation reinstated the “no ties” rule afterward

Until 2002, eligibility was limited to writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland, and Zimbabwe. The change to allow any English-language author published in the UK was controversial. Critics feared American dominance; supporters argued for inclusion. Twenty-three years on, both sides proved partly right. US writers have featured often but not overwhelmed the field. The Booker’s broadened scope reflects the global reality of publishing, where English circulates through multiple centres of gravity rather than one imperial hub.

After P. H. Newby, early winners included Bernice Rubens (1970, The Elected Member), J. G. Farrell (1973, The Siege of Krishnapur), and Nadine Gordimer (1974, The Conservationist).

These books shared a post-imperial outlook, exploring the moral and political consequences of British decline. The Booker quickly established itself as a space where the old empire’s stories were re-examined by both colonisers and colonised. The themes, displacement, class, identity, still define many of the novels honoured years later.

The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 by Booker McConnell Ltd, a British food-distribution company with Caribbean operations. The first award went to P. H. Newby for Something to Answer For, a post-Suez novel about moral confusion. The initial prize money was £5,000 and the goal simple, to raise the profile of the literary novel in a market dominated by non-fiction. Few expected it to last. Within a decade, though, the Booker had become Britain’s most argued-over award, known as much for controversy as prestige.

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Susan Choi has built one of the most versatile and acclaimed careers in contemporary American fiction.

Her debut, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction, and her follow-ups have gathered an impressive constellation of honors: American Woman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist (2004), A Person of Interest a PEN/Faulkner finalist (2009), and My Education won a Lambda Literary Award (2014).

Her 2019 novel Trust Exercise, a sharp, genre-defying exploration of truth and power, won the National Book Award for Fiction and became a U.S. bestseller. Her sixth novel, Flashlight, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, began as a short story in The New Yorker and later won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.

A trustee of PEN America and professor at Johns Hopkins University, Choi continues to challenge how stories are told, and how memory shapes the telling.

Read our review

Born in Sacramento, California, Katie Kitamura is an American novelist, journalist, and art critic whose prose balances restraint with quiet intensity.

A Princeton graduate with a PhD in American literature from the London Consortium, she has written five novels translated into more than 20 languages.

Her fourth, Intimacies, was named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and even made Barack Obama’s year-end reading list.

A recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and fellowships from Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations, Kitamura also writes for Granta, The Guardian, and frieze.

Her fifth novel, Audition, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, blurs the boundaries between performance and truth, confirming Kitamura as one of contemporary fiction’s most disciplined and hypnotic voices.

Born in Bristol and now based in Somerset, Andrew Miller is one of Britain’s most accomplished novelists. Educated at Middlesex Polytechnic, Lancaster University, and the University of East Anglia, where he studied under Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain, Miller has written ten novels translated into over 20 languages.

His debut, Ingenious Pain (1997), swept international prizes including the James Tait Black, IMPAC Dublin, and Grinzane Cavour awards. Oxygen (2001) earned him his first Booker shortlist, while Pure (2011) won the Costa Book of the Year.

His 2025 novel, The Land in Winter, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, revisits the frozen landscapes of 1960s England to explore love, endurance, and memory.

A former social worker and TEFL teacher in Japan and Spain, Miller is also a sailor, aikido black belt, and mandolin player, a man as attuned to rhythm in life as in prose. Read our review of The Land in Winter.

Born in Canada, raised in London, and now based in Vienna, David Szalay is one of the sharpest observers of contemporary manhood.

The author of six works of fiction that have been translated into more than 20 languages, he first drew acclaim with London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes. His breakout, All That Man Is, won the Gordon Burn and Plimpton Prizes, and earned him a Booker shortlist in 2016.

A decade later, he returns with Flesh, a spare, devastating look at power, privilege, and emotional paralysis. Named among Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (2013), Szalay remains the master of quiet unease and razor-sharp restraint. Check out the review.

Hodder & Stoughton’s Sceptre imprint, known for championing sophisticated, emotionally intelligent fiction, published Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, a wry, midlife road novel across America. Sceptre has had six Booker-shortlisted titles before, but no winners yet. Could 2025 finally change that? This might be the year the underdog drives home a win.

Penguin Random House (PRH) commands this year’s Booker lineup, publishing four of the six shortlisted novels.

📌 Jonathan Cape brings Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter and David Szalay’s Flesh, two sharp, introspective studies of endurance and identity.

📌Hamish Hamilton returns with Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the author’s long-awaited comeback after her 2006 Booker win.

📌Fern Press, appearing on the shortlist for the first time, publishes Katie Kitamura’s Audition, a sleek psychological novel about performance and reality.

In 1975, the Booker Prize caused uproar by shortlisting just two novels — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (the winner) and Thomas Keneally’s Gossip from the Forest. Judge Roy Fuller called most modern fiction “rubbish” and refused to include more. Fellow judge Susan Hill later admitted, “I wish we hadn’t caved in.”

India could claim both Bookers this year. Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi already won the International Booker for Heart Lamp, their luminous Kannada novel. If Kiran Desai wins tonight, it will be a clean sweep, one prize for English, one for translation.

This year’s shortlist is a veteran’s table. Six writers, 41 previous novels, and zero first-timers. Chair Roddy Doyle calls it “a triumph of control and confidence.” In a literary climate that often crowns discovery, the judges have chosen mastery.Each of these authors has written their way through failure, revision, and renewal.

Katie Kitamura’s Audition is a cool, unsettling performance about performance itself. Its nameless actress rehearses a play that might never premiere, speaking lines that slip into her real life.

The novel refuses explanation, it simply unfolds like a slow, controlled exhale. Every paragraph feels choreographed, every silence intentional. Some readers find it aloof; others, mesmerising.

The judges, meanwhile, admire its “eerie precision.” In a world constantly posting itself, Audition asks the hardest question: what happens when you stop performing? Kitamura’s calm could be this shortlist’s stealth weapon — quiet on the page, unforgettable in the mind.

With Flesh, David Szalay takes a scalpel to modern manhood. His protagonist István drifts from a rough Hungarian childhood to the polished unease of London’s elite, haunted by guilt and ambition. The sentences are bare, the emotions raw — a study in restraint that leaves bruises.

“It’s about the body as destiny,” Szalay told one interviewer, “and the cost of pretending it isn’t.” The result is fiction as X-ray: nothing hidden, everything illuminated. Readers may flinch, but they’ll keep reading. If the judges are in the mood for austerity that aches, Flesh could easily muscle its way to victory.

It has been nearly twenty years since Kiran Desai last climbed the Booker podium with The Inheritance of Loss. Her comeback novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, sprawls across continents and inner lives. It is a story of migration, class, and longing written with devastating beauty.

Can she become the fifth author in history to win twice? Critics call the book “a love story built on silence,” readers call it a reason to believe in the big novel again.

For Indian audiences, it is nostalgia and newness entwined, a homecoming for a writer who turned exile into art. Whether she wins or not, Desai’s return already feels like the year’s defining literary event.

Odds: 8/1 | Implied Probability: 11.1%

Choi’s innovative, form-breaking storytelling is thrillingly unpredictable, and so is her position on the betting board. She might just be the surprise everyone talks about.

With hours to go before the Booker Prize 2025 winner is announced, the bookmakers have spoken — and the odds are tight! Over the next six posts I will reveal how the numbers stack up for this year’s six shortlisted novels. So, stay tuned!

Six books, six different worlds. Here’s who’s in the running tonight:

📌 David Szalay – Flesh

📌 Andrew Miller – The Land in Winter

📌 Ben Markovits – The Rest of Our Lives

📌 The Booker Prizes

📌 Katie Kitamura – Audition

📌 Kiran Desai – The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

📌 Susan Choi – Flashlight

The expansive list takes us from Hungary to Japan, Italy to the US, India to England, and through decades of family histories, love stories, and quiet revolutions. Expect tears, laughter, and maybe a few existential crises.

This year’s shortlist of six novels has been chosen from a staggering 153 submissions, all works of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025. Each shortlisted author pockets £2,500 (₹2.6 lakh), a gorgeous specially bound edition of their book, and perhaps most exciting of all, global attention. The overall winner will take home £50,000 (₹52.5 lakh) and the world’s literary spotlight.