At 81, British writer M John Harrison has made Booker Prize history, becoming the award’s oldest-ever winner after taking the top honour for his dystopian novel, The End Of Everything.
Set on the near-future Kent coast, the book charts a society sliding into collapse as a mysterious incursion of shapeshifting entities begins to unravel everyday life. The novel’s blend of speculative menace and social breakdown helped propel it to the prize.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, praised Mr Harrison as “a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously”.
The sci-fi title emerged from a shortlist of six, chosen by a judging panel chaired by broadcaster Mary Beard. The judges also included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus.
Mr Harrison, who served as a Booker Prize judge in 2022, received £50,000 and a trophy handed to him by last year’s winner, David Szalay, at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.
The End Of Everything has been characterised as “a dystopian satire that probes the limits of human understanding” and, at 198 pages, was the shortest book among the finalists.
Speaking previously about his nomination on BBC Radio 4, the author — full name Michael John 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 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?”
With the win, Mr Harrison sets a new age record for the Booker Prize, overtaking The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she won in 2019.
The result is also a milestone for Serpent’s Tail, marking the publisher’s first Booker Prize win after five nominations.
Ms Beard said the judges reached their verdict together and without dissent. “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 novel displays a deep command of form — and a willingness to fracture it. “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. Over his career he has also produced award-winning books including Nova Swing and Climbers, alongside five short story collections and an “anti memoir”.
Judges weighed 163 books in total, seeking the best 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 earned a longlist place this year with his debut novel.
The Dubliner’s All Them Dogs was one of three debuts to feature on the longlist.
All Them Dogs centres on Tony Ward, a young gangster who returns to Dublin after five years in England, intent on reclaiming his standing in the city’s criminal underworld.
Past Booker Prize winners include Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernardine Evaristo, Hilary Mantel and Irish authors Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright and Paul Lynch.
