LONDON (The Thursday Times) — M John Harrison, an 81-year-old British writer with a cult following in science fiction, has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history.
Harrison was named the winner of the £50,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Monday. He overtakes Margaret Atwood as the oldest writer to take the Booker, which was launched in 1969 and goes each year to the best novel written in English.
The End of Everything is set on the south-east coast of England in the years after an unexplained catastrophe has brought British society down. It follows a man and his aunt as they try to carry on with their lives while mysterious alien beings arrive.
‘A disaster of explanation’
Harrison has said he deliberately left out as much explanation as he could, so that readers share the confusion of his characters. “The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong. It’s a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend,” he has said.
In a radio interview on Tuesday, he said he had wanted to satirise “the present-day barrage of information that we all suffer”, and to build “a disaster of explanation, a disaster of the failure to understand the world as it was now”.
Mary Beard, the classicist who chaired the judges, called it “a challenging read, but some of the best fiction is challenging”. She said the book “turns you upside down, raises a wry smile, and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism.”
From cult figure to Booker
Harrison began publishing in the 1960s and has written 13 novels, five short story collections, and what he calls an “anti-memoir”. He dislikes labels such as science fiction and fantasy, but has long been regarded as one of the most original writers to come out of the genre.
Gaby Wood, the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said he was “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world” and called him “a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously”.
The judges, who also included the novelist Patricia Lockwood, the poet Raymond Antrobus, the musician Jarvis Cocker, and the critic Rebecca Liu, spent a full day debating before reaching a unanimous decision, Beard said. “There was a lot of discussion, disagreement and debate. But nobody stomped off.”
The other shortlisted writers were Elizabeth Strout, Luke Kennard, Rebecca Perry, Marlon James, and Douglas Stuart. Last year’s prize went to David Szalay for Flesh.
