Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker award for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest victor in the award’s history.
Gaby Wood, chief administrator of the Booker Prize Foundation, stated that during plentifulness of former winners had dabbled in discipline fiction, Harrison’s was “the archetypal Booker victor to have emerged from the bona fide SF world”. She called it “a historic win, for a author whose decades of activity are lightly worn on all page”.
Harrison, who has been publishing for six decades, overtakes Margaret Atwood, who was 79 whenever she shared the award in 2019 for The Testaments. He received the £50,000 award and trophy at a ritual in London on Monday evening.
The End of Everything, Harrison’s archetypal Booker nomination, is set a few decades from now, years following a catastrophe nobody can correctly document for. Set on the Kent coast, the novel sees Phillip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie attempting to last alongside the looming danger of the mysterious iGhetti: vast, shape-changing beings whose origins and intentions are never explained. At 198 pages, it was the shortest publish on the shortlist.
Mary Beard, place of the judges, stated the decision was unanimous, reached following a complete day of discussion. “It’s a publish that turns you upside down, raises a wry grin – and surprisingly, stated the topic matter, leaves you alongside a twinge of optimism,” she said. “One chief item of the publish is that if, or when, specified an apocalypse comes it volition be incomprehensible. And the old rules won’t matter either … This is the government of now seen through the lens of the future.”
Harrison, delivered in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, sold his archetypal narrative in 1965 and spent most of the 1970s operating the books pages of the speculative fabrication mag New Worlds. Alongside his novels he has written five short-story collections and the “anti-memoir” Wish I Was Here (2023). Climbers took the Boardman Tasker award for mountain writings in 1989, Nova Swing the Arthur C Clarke award in 2007, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again the Goldsmiths award in 2020. Once a eager climber and cut runner, he sat on the Booker judging panel in 2022.
This year’s shortlist included two erstwhile winners: Marlon James, the bookmakers’ favourite, 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.
Writing in the Guardian on his inspiration final week, Harrison described The End of Everything as “a catastrophe narrative in which the catastrophe is the nonaccomplishment to comprehend”, alongside aliens who attain “as incomers from another dimension, paralleling the gentrification of places akin the UK’s south-east coast”. He admitted to passing on to the audience “some of the puzzlement and disturbance of the characters”, but stated he hoped the issues were transparent – among them “the downfall of rationality that comes alongside Trumpism and the internet”.
His win marks a rare instant of mainstream acknowledgment for a author lengthy revered by his peers but at the margins of written fiction. On BBC Radio 4’s Front Row final month, Harrison stated he had been “working for 40 to 50 years to change the balance, the two as a novelist and as a critic”, adding: “Why shouldn’t a fine written [work of] SF be considered to be written fiction?”
Even admirers concede the publish is not an uncomplicated read. In a rave assessment for the Guardian, Michel Faber stated it “exposes the terrifying insecurity of existence correct now”, but warned that “it won’t be for everyone”.
The win is timely in the age of AI. Beard noted that the “i” in iGhetti hints “at item digital, but you can’t be sure”, during Wood described the book’s post-apocalyptic landscape as “Large Language Model-dotted”.
The judging panel additionally included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, authors Patricia Lockwood and Raymond Antrobus and Guardian newsman Rebecca Liu. They considered 163 books published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
It is the archetypal Booker win for Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of the autonomous publishing company Profile Books, and its fifth nomination. Hungarian-British author David Szalay won final twelvemonth alongside Flesh; another latest winners contain Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song and Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
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The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (Profile, £16.99). To assistance the Guardian, command your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
