Canadian-born David Szalay wins Booker Prize literary award for his novel Flesh

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We’ve got quite a few book prizes of our own here in Canada. But perhaps the most comparable in terms of prize purse and glitz and glamour is the $100,000 Giller Prize.

Recognizing the best in Canadian fiction, this year’s Giller Prize ceremony is on Nov. 17. Mona Awad, Eddy Boudel Tan, Emma Donoghue, Emma Knight and Souvankham Thammavongsa are the five writers shortlisted for 2025.

The Giller Prize made headlines recently for controversy surrounding its former lead sponsor, Scotiabank. Formerly known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the award parted ways with Scotiabank as a sponsor earlier this year, after around two years of protests surrounding the bank's investment in Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence contractor.

Hungarian-British author David Szalay was born in Montreal and currently lives in Vienna. He also made the Booker short list in 2016 for All That Man Is.

The Land in Winter is Andrew Miller’s 10th novel. The Somerset, U.K.-based author was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 for Oxygen.

Katie Kitamura, author of Audition.

Kiran Desai, author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

Susan Choi was born in South Bend, Ind., and is now based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Flashlight is her sixth novel. Choi is also known for her 2019 novel, Trust Exercise, which won the National Book Award for fiction.

Hi! I’m Kevin Maimann, a senior writer with the national desk. The judges and the six nominees have arrived on the red carpet for the Booker Prize ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.

While Maria Reva didn’t make the short list (did someone say snub?), she joined Szalay as the other Canadian on the 2025 Booker Prize long list.

The B.C.-based, Ukraine-born author was featured for her wild and unconventional debut novel, Endling, which tells the story of three women and a last-of-his-kind snail whose lives are upended by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It’s a personal favourite of mine.

Reva’s still got a lot to look forward to this week. Endling is on the short list for the $70,000 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, which will be announced on Thursday night.

There are six books on the short list, whittled down from the 13 books on the longlist out of the 153 submissions total. Here's what they're about.

1. Flashlight by Susan Choi started out as a short story in the New Yorker. It's about a man raised in Japan by Korean parents who seeks a better life in America. It chronicles his wife and daughter's pain in the aftermath of his mysterious disappearance.

2. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai is the story of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years before they eventually fall in love. It's a story of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity.

3. Audition by Katie Kitamura is about a successful New York-based actress whose life is cleaved in two by the appearance of a young man who may or may not be who he says he is. Two competing narratives unspool in this book that asks how well we know the people we love.

4. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits chronicles a midlife crisis in the form of a meandering road trip from Cape Cod to California. It tells the story of a middle-aged academic whose marriage, career and body are failing him.

5. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller is an examination of the minutiae of life and a dazzling chronicle of the human heart. Two couples in 1960s rural England find their lives beginning to unravel when the ordinary cold of December gives way to violent blizzards.

6. Flesh by David Szalay follows the course of one man's rags-to-riches life, as he drifts passively from a housing estate in Central Europe to the mansions of London's super-rich. It asks what drives a life, what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

So what are the odds?

U.K. Bookmaker William Hill has British author Andrew Miller winning the prize for The Land in Winter with 15-8 odds.

Indian writer Kiran Desai comes in close second with 2-1 odds for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

As a Canadian, I'm rooting for Montreal-born David Szalay's Flesh (it has the next highest odds at 4-1). But as someone who stayed up way past her bed time last night devouring The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, I wouldn't be mad if that novel got its flowers.

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