Booker Prize 2026: M John Harrison wins for The End of Everything

M John Harrison has become the oldest winner of the Booker Prize. The 81-year-old British author won this year’s £50,000 award for his dystopian satire The End of Everything.

At 198 pages, The End of Everything was the shortest book on the shortlist, which included two former winners, Marlon James (The Disappearers) and Douglas Stuart (John of John), alongside Elizabeth Strout (The Things We Never Say), Rebecca Perry (May We Feed the King) and Luke Kennard (Black Bag).

Chair of the judges, historian Mary Beard, said Harrison was the unanimous choice of the judges: poet Raymond Antrobus; musician Jarvis Cocker; critic Rebecca Liu; and writer Patricia Lockwood.

She praised the author’s “extraordinary, expert writing and huge ambition”, summing the winning novel up as “the politics of now seen through the lens of the future and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism”.

Beard insisted the prize was not a lifetime achievement award – it is Harrison’s 13th novel in a 60-year career. “He’s only 10 years older than me. We are not celebrating octogenarians.”

The End of Everything follows a beachcomber and his pistol-toting aunt as they eke out an existence on the Kent coast in the near future, set against a backdrop of societal collapse and the mysterious invasion of shapeshifting entities called the iGhetti. A violent act near the start of the novel plunges the characters into a post-moral universe. The novel is shrouded in a dreamlike ambiguity. Writing in short, filmic chapters, Harrison both leans on conventional literary forms and upends them, letting the reader fill in the gaps.

Beard rejected any suggestion that it was a difficult novel that required three readings to understand. It was a challenging but enjoyable read that rewarded careful reading, she said.

“It’s not difficult in terms of fancy words or confusing sentences,” she said. “We are in a society that is undergoing a catastrophic and apocalyptic change. As a reader, you are with the characters in not knowing what is happening.”

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize foundation, said its rules no longer mention literary fiction, which was a tautology. “All fiction is literary. Many past Booker Prize authors have borrowed facets of science fiction in their work, but M John Harrison is the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world. He is a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously.

I’m very excited that a fiction of this type should be shortlisted, and that it should have been mine ... Why shouldn’t a well-written work of science fiction be considered to be literary fiction?

—  M John Harrison

“The End of Everything is a novel that knows everything about the novel form, and exactly what it’s doing when it breaks it. Readers will also recognise many tropes from cinema: the disaster movie, the road movie, the couple on the run, the noir heroine with a gun in her bag, the apocalypse.

“Though very unsettling, The End of Everything is not in fact a strange book. It’s a realist book about a strange world, populated by desperate, unmoored characters. One of the judges memorably described it as owing as much to Katherine Mansfield as it does to JG Ballard. Marnie, one of the protagonists, suffers from dementia, and dementia offers a framework for understanding the novel as a whole: everything in this post-disaster world is scrambled.

“Harrison reports on an imagined post-apocalyptic, Large Language Model-dotted landscape with a documentary eye. Like his beachcomber character Philip, Harrison is a collector: he has spent a lifetime gathering words for things most people would not think to name. His sentences are collages of intense descriptive precision. This is a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page.”

Reviewing it for The Irish Times, Colm McKenna was less convinced. “Harrison’s rudderless spin on the post-apocalyptic story is a novel depiction of end times. Toying with staples of the genre, The End of Everything is both a lingering exploration on the psychological effects of planetary destruction and humanity’s tendency to turn a blind eye.

“Unfortunately, in capturing a world that’s shed its values, Harrison offers a stop-start narrative populated by characters operating outside of a recognisable ‘emotional structure’, making it hard for readers to properly engage with the text. It’s a memorable, haunting work, but who it’s for exactly is unclear.”

Harrison’s award-winning novels 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 2020 Goldsmiths Prize for innovation in fiction. You Should Come With Me Now, a collection of short stories, was published in 2017, and Settling the World: Selected Stories in 2021.

[ The End of Everything by M John Harrison: A rudderless spin on the post-apocalyptic storyOpens in new window ]

He is a former rock climber and fell runner, and was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2022. This is the first Booker Prize win for his publisher, Serpent’s Tail.

Harrison said: “I’m very excited that a fiction of this type should be shortlisted, and that it should have been mine. Because I have been working for 40-50 years to shift the balance, both as a novelist and as a critic. Why shouldn’t a well-written work of science fiction be considered to be literary fiction?

“I wanted this book to offer a different shape: a catastrophe the nature of which is impossible to parse,” he wrote in the Guardian. “Nested inside the novel are various parodies, pastiches and political metaphors; a certain amount of grotesque humour. 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.

“I hope, though, that the issues are transparent: the collapse of rationality that comes with Trumpism and the internet, and which consciously confounds the ability to make a factual statement about anything; humanity’s inexplicable attempt to break down and abandon the environment it can’t live without; the loss of any sense that we actually know how to manage the world except via a Netflix empowerment fantasy.”