My earliest reading memory
Memories from my childhood are opening up as I read to my own young children at the moment. Something in the pictures of Helen Cooper’s The Bear Under the Stairs or Lane Smith’s The Big Pets takes me back to being four years old and being read to.

My favourite book growing up
I love the Sabriel series by Garth Nix and first read it alongside my father and, later, my younger brother. It was truly a shared joy to be immersed in that world, for a book to give us a new connection to one another.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I don’t remember what age I was when I found The Bone People by Keri Hulme on my parents’ bookshelf, probably too young. I was a swirling hurricane of a teenager and reading about Kerewin alone in her tower felt momentous. There was something about the way that the anger and fear in the book bury into the writing.

The writer who changed my mind
I think my mind is being changed by writing all of the time, but most recently Ed Yong’s book about animal senses, An Immense World, completely changed my perspective on the world around us. Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad is one of the books about the genocide of the Palestinian people that has started to educate me. Women Talking by Miriam Toews showed me what fiction could be capable of.

The book that made me want to be a writer
It probably happened slowly, without my really realising. I think the Alfie books by Shirley Hughes were a beginning – the beautiful domesticity, the pacing. The first time I actually remember having that envious buzzing feeling of “What if I could do this?” was probably with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg.

The book or author I came back to
In a previous interview I said I was not a fan of David Szalay, but I think that Flesh is a masterpiece.

The book I reread
I reread all of the time. Both as a reader, for love, and as a writer. There is such delight in finding new things, in the writing, in yourself. Both Orlando and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf are books I first read as a literature student and have returned to later and again, very recently.

The book I could never read again
I wish I never had to read Dr Seuss’s The Lorax again; where can I hide it?

The book I discovered later in life
I have only recently picked up A Room With a View by EM Forster, after loving Lucy Honeychurch in the film, and it is so wonderful and funny. I have also just started reading the work of Yōko Ogawa, a brilliant writer.

The book I am currently reading

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson – and I’m listening to The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell.

My comfort read
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.

Hungarian-British author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker prize for his novel Flesh.

Szalay’s sixth work of fiction traces the life of one man, István, from his youth to midlife. The judges “had never read anything quite like it”, said panel chair Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993. “It is, in many ways, a dark book, but it is a joy to read.”

Flesh opens with a shocking incident that unfolds while teenage István is living in an apartment complex with his mother in Hungary. Szalay then follows the protagonist as he spends time in the military before moving to London, where he begins working for the uber-rich. Written in spare prose, the novel explores masculinity, class, migration, trauma, sex and power.

Szalay was announced as the winner of the £50,000 award at a ceremony held in Old Billingsgate in London on Monday evening. He was previously shortlisted for the prize in 2016, for his novel All That Man Is.

The decision to hand Szalay the award was “unanimous”, said Doyle. Joining him on this year’s panel was the actor Sarah Jessica Parker, along with the writers Chris Power, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and Kiley Reid.

The book “homes in on a working-class man, which ordinarily doesn’t get much of a look in”, said Doyle. “It presents us with a certain type of man” and “invites us to look behind the face.”

“Without anybody being consciously aware of it, I was reared, for example, never to cry,” Doyle said. “I became aware of that and decided it was nonsense,” but István is “that type of man”.

“Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive,” wrote Keiran Goddard in a Guardian review of the novel. “Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. Szalay has always been a master of the flinty, spare sentence but in this novel he has pared things back even more brutally.”

Szalay’s novel topped a strong shortlist which included bookies’ favourite Andrew Miller, with The Land in Winter, and Kiran Desai, nominated for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since winning the Booker with The Inheritance of Loss in 2006. The other novels shortlisted this year were Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, and Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives.

Asked whether any of the other novels had got close to challenging Szalay’s win, Doyle said “the answer is ‘kinda yes’,” but refused to name specific titles, saying it would be “unfair, a bit cruel”.

Born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, Szalay grew up in London. He has lived in Lebanon and the UK, and now lives in Vienna. After graduating from Oxford, he worked as a financial advertising sales executive, which became the inspiration for his debut novel, London and the South-East. He is also the author of the novels Spring and The Innocent, as well as the short story collection Turbulence.

Writing in the Guardian over the weekend on his inspiration for Flesh, Szalay said that the novel was “conceived in the shadow of failure” – in autumn 2020 he abandoned a novel he had been working on for nearly four years that he felt wasn’t working. He wanted Flesh to “somehow express the feeling I had that our existence is a physical experience before it is anything else, that all of its other aspects proceed from that physicality”.

His win marks the 10th for publisher Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin, which has the most wins in the history of the prize. Last year’s winning title, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, was also published by Cape.

Other recent winners include Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka and The Promise by Damon Galgut.

• Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Batool Abu Akleen was having lunch in the seaside apartment that has become the latest refuge for her family of seven, when a missile struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza City. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window shook,” she says. Within an instant, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that was reported around the world. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the nonchalance of someone numbed by living with horror.

But this impression is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding a language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies.

In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, fleetingly referencing both the US’s role and its history of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a woman wanders the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to buy a secondhand ceasefire (she can’t, because the price keeps going up). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it consists of 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of her own weight. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was smashed and there was no one there to bury me.”

We are talking via videocall to a workhub near her home. Abu Akleen is elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, twiddling rings on two fingers that testify both to the fashion sense of someone barely out of her teens and to yet another catastrophe. One of her close friends, the photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike this spring, a month before the Cannes film festival premiere of a documentary about her life, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Fatma loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and sunsets, the night before she died. “Now I wonder whether I should remember her by wearing my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children born into a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She started writing aged 10 “and it just clicked”, she says. Before long, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an exceptional talent that must be nurtured. Her mother has ever since been her first reader and editor.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and individual poems started to be published in journals and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled at English, and now speaks it fluently enough to be able to translate her own work, although she has never ventured beyond Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she says. To egg herself on she stuck a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

She settled for a degree in English literature and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when Hamas launched its 7 October attack on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a spoilt girl who used always to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This theme, of the privileges of peace taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A busker used to fill our street with boredom,” begins one, which ends, begging, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she lamented “in poems as casual as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the murder of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a granddaughter asks in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face back together and kiss it one more time. Dismemberment is a constant motif in the collection, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to join the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was hit by two missiles in the street outside their home as he walked from one building to another. “We heard the screams of a woman and no one dared to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no ambulance. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father stayed in north Gaza to protect their home from looters, while the rest of the family moved to a refugee camp in the south. “There was no gas cooker, so we did everything on a wood fire,” she recalls. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always angry and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that time depicts a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached me / Ring Finger I lend to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will make my peace / with all the food I hated to eat.”

After composing the poems in Arabic, she rewrote all but a few in English. The two versions are presented side by side. “They’re not translations, they’re recreations, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s another version of me – the more recent one.”

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

In a preface to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was losing herself to a terror of being torn apart, and through translation she made peace with death. “I think the genocide helped to build my personality,” she says. “The move from the north to the south with just my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Though their old home was destroyed, the family decided during the short-lived ceasefire in January this year to return to Gaza City, renting the apartment in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are not so lucky. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I eat & my father starves / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she writes in a poem called Sin, which negotiates her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read horizontally or vertically, making concrete the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the other side of the ampersand.

Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study online, has started teaching young children, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a destroyed society – was considered far too dangerous in the good old days. Also, she says, surprisingly, “I learned to be rude, which is good. It means you can use bad words with bad people; you don’t have to be that polite person all the time. It helped me so much with being the person that I am today.”

As a child she had to be cajoled into reading. Still, she says, “I read the world more than I read books.” In the imagery of her own poetry, the horrors she has witnessed have put an old head on young shoulders. “This is what happens when death is chasing after you,” she says. “You run so fast through life to live as much as you can, because you know you don’t have the luxury of being young and making mistakes.”