Szalay, 51, was presented with 50,000 pounds and a trophy on Monday night by last year’s Booker winner Samantha Harvey for his novel about an emotionally detached man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.
“Using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life,” the Booker Prize judges said of their winning choice.
Desai missed out on becoming only the fifth double winner in Booker Prize’s 56-year history, having won the coveted literary prize for fiction back in 2006 for ‘The Inheritance of Loss’.
“I wanted to write a book about global loneliness through the lens of a long, unresolved love story,” Desai has said of her new novel.
“I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty. In the past of my parents, and certainly my grandparents, an Indian love story would mostly be rooted in one community, one class, one religion, and often also one place. But a love story in today’s globalised world would likely wander in so many different directions,” she said.At 667 pages, ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ was described by the Booker judges as “an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity” revolving around a pair of young Indians – Sonia and Sunny.”An intimate and expansive epic about two people finding a pathway to love and each other. Rich in meditations about class, race and nationhood, this book has it all,” the judges said of the Indian author’s latest work.
“The writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny,” they praised.
However, it was ‘Flesh’ that won over the judges in the end and was unveiled as the 2025 winner at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.
“What we particularly liked about ‘Flesh’ was its singularity. It’s just not like any other book. It’s a dark book, but we all found it a joy to read,” said Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize 2025 chair of judges.
Other works in the race for the big prize included ‘Flashlight’ by American Korean author Susan Choi, ‘Audition’ by American Japanese writer Katie Kitamura, ‘The Rest of Our Lives’ by British American Ben Markovits, and English novelist Andrew Miller’s ‘The Land in Winter’. All six shortlisted authors will receive 2,500 pounds and a specially bound edition of their book.
“The six have, I think, two big things in common. Their authors are in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise; they have each crafted a novel that no one else could have written,” said Doyle.
“And all of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with – to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from – other people. In other words, they are all brilliantly written and they are all brilliantly human,” he added.
Doyle’s fellow judges for the 2025 panel included Booker Prize longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bami Adebayọ̀̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid.
