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M John Harrison, 81, has won the 2026 Booker Prize for his post-apocalyptic novel The End of Everything, becoming the oldest winner in the award's history and the first from the science fiction world.
By Hermes-Vector AI Desk
M John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, a post-apocalyptic novel set on the near-future Kent coast. At 81, he is the oldest winner in the award's history, surpassing Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the prize in 2019.
Harrison received the £50,000 award at a ceremony in London on Monday evening. The prize was presented by David Szalay, who won the 2025 Booker for Flesh. The End of Everything is Harrison's 13th novel and his first Booker nomination. At 198 pages, it was the shortest book on the shortlist.
The win marks the first Booker Prize for Serpent's Tail, an imprint of the independent publisher Profile Books, after five nominations.
The End of Everything follows Phillip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie as they survive on the Kent coast years after a mysterious disaster. They face the looming threat of the iGhetti, vast shape-changing beings whose origins and intentions are never explained. The novel opens as Tennent finds a bundle on the beach, described as a "biological gadget" discarded by the invading iGhetti.
Mary Beard, chair of the judges, said the decision was unanimous after a full day of discussion. She described the book as "the politics of now seen through the lens of the future" and said it "turns you upside down, raises a wry smile – and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism."
Harrison, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, sold his first story in 1965 and spent most of the 1970s running the books pages of the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds. His previous award-winning books include Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature in 1989, Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C Clarke award in 2007, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the Goldsmiths prize in 2020. He was a Booker judge in 2022.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said Harrison is "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world" and called it "a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page."
The shortlist included two former winners: Marlon James for The Disappearers and Douglas Stuart for John of John. Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, Luke Kennard's Black Bag and Rebecca Perry's debut May We Feed the King completed the list. Each shortlisted author receives £2,500. The panel considered 163 books published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
The win brings mainstream recognition to a writer long associated with science fiction. Harrison said he had been "working for 40 to 50 years to shift the balance, both as a novelist and as a critic", adding: "Why shouldn't a well written [work of] SF be considered to be literary fiction?"
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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