What does winning the Booker Prize mean today? Insights from BA English at UON

On Monday 10 November the 2025 winner of the Booker prize was announced as Flesh by David Szalay. The Booker prize is self-proclaimed as the “leading literary award in the English-speaking world” (Bookerprize.com), which for over 50 years has brought recognition, readers, and a substantial financial reward to “outstanding fiction” published in English in the UK and Ireland (Bookerprize.com). Here at The University of Northampton, we have been reflecting on what this famous accolade can tell us about the state of contemporary literature, culture and society.

The Booker prize was first awarded in 1969 with the aim of stimulating reading and discussion of contemporary fiction. Following in the footsteps of European counterparts, the aim was to raise the profile of Anglophone literature in a similar way to the Prix Goncourt in France. The inaugural prize was awarded to P.H. Newby for his novel Something to Answer. The judging panel consists of writers, literary critics, academics and public figures. This year judges include Sarah Jessica Parker and chief judge, Roddy Doyle (a previous Booker winner).

Whilst the aims of raising the profile of English fiction seem laudable, the prize does also have a more controversial history. The Booker prize was established by Tom Maschler who persuaded food and sugar trader Booker-McConnell (a conglomerate with a significant presence in Guyana) to sponsor the prize. The 1972 winner, John Berger famously condemned the sponsor’s colonial past and vowed to donate half his winnings to the Black Panthers. Despite these initial questionable ethics, since the millennium, colonialism and its aftereffects have proven to be a major topic of interest within the winning texts, playing a key part in consciousness raising of the damaging consequences of colonialism and slavery (as noted by Naomi Adam).

Despite questionable origins, the prize continued to gain popular appeal. In 1976 the BBC first televised the prize ceremony, meaning that the level of competition increased exponentially. Today the winner receives £50,000, and “are guaranteed a global readership and can expect a dramatic increase in book sales” (Bookerprize.com) known as the ‘Booker bounce’. Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, a text taught on the module ‘Representing Class: Stories & Conflicts’ of UON’s BA English course, enjoyed a 1,900% increase in the first week following the win. Thus, winning the Booker prize can be a life-changing event for writers, granting them a readership for many decades to come.

If the Booker prize continues to play an important role in our literary lives, an inevitable question is ‘what does it take to win the Booker prize’? Writer Naomi Adam has conducted some statistical analysis into this very question, noting that: “despite recent efforts towards greater inclusivity, the average Booker-winning author still fits the writerly stereotype of male, pale and stale” with male authors being more than twice as likely to win than females. In terms of the book itself, she notes that statistically the winning book will be “A 408-page hardback”, it will be “sparse on punctuation, and heavy on political satire” and interesting “it’s got a nice mid-blue front cover, too” (Adams). Therefore, with such a lack of diversity as well as a problematic link with colonialism, can the prize really offer contemporary readers anything meaningful?

In 2023 Paul Lynch took home the prize for Prophet Song, a novel on the reading list for the ‘Twenty-First Century Literature’ module on our own English degree. Lynch recounts how he is “trying to see into the modern chaos” of our world in his work, particularly in relation to events in Syria and “the scale of its refugee crisis and the West’s indifference” to it. He defines his text as an “attempt at radical empathy” aiming to encourage the reader to “not just know but feel this problem for themselves” (bookerprize.com). In 2024, Samantha Harvey, the first woman to win in 5 years (Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood are key previous female authors who are also studied on the English degree),  argues her work “‘speak[s] for and not against the Earth […] and [for] all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace” (Bookerprize.com).

So, what might this year’s winner tell us about current concerns? David Szalay is a Canadian-born Hungarian British writer who lived in Lebanon as a child until his family were forced to leave due to civil war. His novel Flesh tells a ‘rags to riches’ story of the protagonist István. A key theme of the novel is a crisis in masculinity, particular working-class masculinity, which is a demographic Doyle describes as not getting “much of a look in” (Jordan) in contemporary literature. Doyle recounts some of the toxic gender traits he has experienced: “[w]ithout anybody being consciously aware of it, I was reared, for example, never to cry,” (Jordan).  Whilst Doyle reports being at liberty to break free of such emotional constraints, István doesn’t have the same luxury. Dealing with and thriving in difficult situations is a clear theme for Szalay, who has stated that Flesh was “conceived in the shadow of failure” (Jordan) when in 2020 he was forced to abandon a novel he had been working on for nearly four years. Therefore, the key lessons we can perhaps take from this year’s (and other recent) Booker winning novels include: never giving up despite challenges we may face; to be brave; and to challenge societal expectations. These are all qualities integral to our values on the English degree at UON. Despite the controversy and limited scope of the past winners of the Booker prize, perhaps in recent time, the winning texts include morals and ethics which align with the University’s own strategic aims in that these texts demonstrate a commitment to sustainability (with Orbital) and inclusivity through representation of marginalised groups through Prophet Song and Flesh.

Bibliography

• Adam, Naomi. “How to win the Booker prize: is there a formula for ‘the finest in fiction?’” The Conversation, October 14, 2022.
• Jordan, Justine, ‘David Szalay wins 2025 Booker Prize for ‘dark Flesh’. The Guardian. Monday 10 November 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/nov/10/david-szalay-wins-2025-booker-prize-for-dark-flesh
• https://thebookerprizes.com, 2025

Dr Claire Allen

Dr Claire Allen is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton.