42. David Szalay: Flesh

Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, David Szalay’s Flesh is both a hypnotic page-turner and a revelatory exploration of desire, wealth, masculinity, and free will. A young man is carried thrillingly upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, from poverty to unimaginable riches—until his own competing impulses threaten to undo him completely. The Booker’s panel of judges declared they “had never read anything quite like [it].” Szalay sits down for a conversation about Flesh, and the ineffable fates and forces that drive a life. Moderated by Alix Ohlin.

More information about the Festival:
Venue Map and Addresses | Box Office | Accessibility

Event Participants:

Alix Ohlin

ALIX OHLIN's most recent book is the story collection We Want What We Want. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia.

David Szalay

DAVID SZALAY was born in Montreal in 1974, and moved to the U.K. the following year. His most recent novel, Flesh, won the 2025 Booker Prize. He won the Betty Trask Prize for his first novel, London and the South-East (2008), along with the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was recently named one of the Telegraph's "Top 20 British Writers under 40," a Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, and he won the 2016 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, awarded by the Paris Review for an outstanding contribution to the magazine. These days, David lives in Vienna.