Dua Lipa’s favourite Hungarian author won the 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction
Last night, British-Hungarian author Dávid Szalay, Dua Lipa’s favourite Hungarian author, won the 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction for his sixth novel Flesh.
Published in March 2025, Flesh tells the story of István, an enigmatic and emotionally detached man who is swept from a Hungarian housing estate to the world of the ultra-rich in London, exploring class, masculinity, and the fragility of the body with Szalay’s trademark precision.
Chair of the judges Roddy Doyle remarked ‘Flesh was the book we kept coming back to … because of its singularity. We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read.’
Accepting the prize Szalay said ‘I felt Flesh was quite a risky novel… and I felt all along that risk was very important to take, because fiction can take aesthetic, formal, perhaps even moral risks, and it’s vital for the novel-making community to embrace that.’
The novel’s resonance has made waves far beyond the literary world — from Dua Lipa giving a masterclass in how to properly pronounce István’s name in her book club to Stormzy’s reading for the Booker Prize video series, the Liszt Institute London wrote in a Facebook post.
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