The winner of the 2025 Booker Prize is here, and it’s one that “breaks new ground” for chief executive, Gaby Wood.
Flesh by David Szalay, the author’s sixth work of fiction, is crowned the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, marking the first time a Hungarian-British author grabs gold. As chair of judges Roddy Doyle explains “We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read.”
Over the past few months, a panel of five prestigious judges were tasked with reading 153 books (equating to roughly 25 or 30 every month) to narrow the list down to just six, and now just one, the winner.
Back in September, for the first time in the Booker Prize’s 50-year history, last night the five judges unveiled their well-deserved shortlist for 2025 in a public ceremony at Royal Festival Hall in the Southbank Centre – and we were there. Accompanied by live readings by actors Louise Brealey and Alfred Enoch, the judging panel – 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, actress and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, writer and previous Booker Prize long-lister Kiley Reid, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power, and Booker Prize-longlisted author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ – explained the contribution of each novel to our modern culture. On Monday 10th November, the winner was announced in a private ceremony.
Most of all, the prize is a reminder of how much we can learn from reading. As judge Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ put it, “there is a gift of clarity of vision some of these books have given […] a clarity to articulate some of these feelings I have felt myself but couldn’t put into words. I am very grateful to these writers for that.” Summarising that the most important part of the prize is “the capacity of these great writers to remind us of our common humanity” – a reminder we need now more than ever.
Here is a wonderfully creative and standard-setting list of books to add to your winter reading list.
The Booker Prize 2025 Winner
The opening chapter of this novel is Booker Prize judge Kiley Reid’s favourite from the shortlist. Flesh delineates a man’s life from his sixteenth birthday onwards, as one moment of chance transports a man from his small apartment in Hungary right into the elite society of London, written via episodic flashes that jump years – sometimes decades – without you feeling like you have missed a beat.
The Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist
Louisa is the daughter of an American mother, Anne, and Korean father, Serk. On a family holiday in Japan, she finds herself washed up on the shore of a beach, her father missing, and no recollection of what has happened. Years pass as the family grapples with this loss and tries to piece it all together. Booker Prize Judge Roddy Doyle comments that “the ending is just unbelievable. Heartbreaking and stunning […] it took me a while to accept it.”
Aspiring novelist Sonia and New York-based journalist Sunny first see each other while travelling on an overnight train. Over the coming years (and continents) their lives continue to intersect. Set between India and the US, the novel mulls over the concepts of home, place, nation and all the feelings of belonging, isolation, and love that come with it. For Booker Prize judge Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ “this book is written with such wisdom and compassion and criticism, a criticism that bears the love of your country”.
What does it mean to perform, especially when your life revolves around the stage? One day in New York, an accomplished actress meets a young and attractive man for lunch. What will they become to one another as their roles shift (both on and off stage) over the theatre that is life? For Booker Prize judge Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ this novel is a “wonderful meditation on performance – both public and private performance”.
When a man’s wife is unfaithful while their children are young, he vows to leave her as soon as their youngest child turns 18. That day arrives; he drops his youngest at university, and just drives. Booker Prize judge Kiley Reid enthuses that this is “the warmest book on the shortlist” and that there “so many ways to read this novel” because it “grows each time you read it”. For Sarah Jessica Parker this is a “beautifully quiet and devastating book”.
Did you know there was a Big Freeze in the UK during 1962 to 1963? Across these winter months, the UK felt the coldest winter in 250 years, including heavy snowfall, blizzards, and a country at a standstill. In Andrew Miller’s novel, two couples find themselves cut off from the rest of the world in a devastating winter. For Booker Prize judge Sarah Jessica Parker, ”massive themes are felt” throughout the book, wrought with “delicate prose with vivid observations”.
Lead image credit: Booker Prize 2025 judges Chris Power, Kiley Reid, Roddy Doyle, Sarah Jessica Parker and Ayòbámi Adébáyò at The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist announcement event at the Southbank Centre, London.
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