British author, 81, becomes oldest winner of Booker Prize

British author M John Harrison has become the oldest winner of the Booker Prize aged 81.

He has received the accolade for his dystopian novel, The End Of Everything, which is set on the near-future Kent coast and navigates the mysterious invasion of shapeshifting entities amid a societal collapse.

Mr Harrison has been lauded as "a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously" by chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gaby Wood.

His sci-fi novel was selected as the winner from a shortlist of six books by a judging panel chaired by broadcaster Mary Beard, which also included Pulp frontman, Jarvis Cocker, and award-winning poet, Raymond Antrobus.

Mr Harrison, who was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2022, has received £50,000 and a trophy presented by last year's winner, David Szalay, during a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.

The End Of Everything, which has been described as "a dystopian satire that probes the limits of human understanding", was the shortest book among the contenders with 198 pages.

The author, full name Michael John Harrison, previously discussed his Booker Prize nomination on BBC Radio 4 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 to 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?"

Mr Harrison has become the oldest winner in the history of the Booker Prize, surpassing The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she received the prestigious literary award in 2019.

It also marks the first Booker Prize win for The End Of Everything's publisher, Serpent's Tail, after five nominations.

Ms Beard, chair of the Booker Prize judges, said: "In the view of the judges, it was a unanimous decision.

"This was the book that stood out above all the other amazing, wonderful, and mind-blowing books we were looking at.

"It came out ahead in terms of both its extraordinary expert writing, but also its huge ambition."

Ms Wood said: "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."

"This is a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page," she added.

The End Of Everything is Mr Harrison's 13th novel, and the author has also published award-winning books such as Nova Swing and Climbers, as well as five short story collections and an "anti memoir".

The panel considered 163 books and was looking for the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

Irish author Djamel White and his debut novel was longlisted for the award this year.

The Dubliner's All Them Dogs was among three debut novels on this year's longlist.

All Them Dogs follows Tony Ward, a young gangster who returns to Dublin after five years in England hoping to regain his place in the city's criminal underworld.

Previous winners of the Booker Prize include Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernardine Evaristo, Hilary Mantel along with Irish authors Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright and Paul Lynch.