M John Harrison has rewritten the Booker Prize record books, becoming the award’s oldest winner at 81.
The British author took the top honour for his dystopian novel, The End Of Everything, a near-future story set on the Kent coast where society unravels as mysterious shapeshifting entities invade.
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 after deliberations by a judging panel led by broadcaster Mary Beard. The judges also included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus.
Mr Harrison, who previously served as a Booker Prize judge in 2022, was awarded £50,000 and a trophy handed over by last year’s winner, David Szalay, at a ceremony held 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, it was the briefest book among this year’s finalists.
Speaking earlier 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 becomes the oldest Booker Prize recipient on record, overtaking The Handmaid’s Tale writer Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she won in 2019.
The result is also a milestone for Serpent’s Tail, marking the first Booker Prize victory for the publisher after five previous nominations.
Ms Beard said the judges reached a clear conclusion: “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 the 13th novel by Mr Harrison, who has also produced acclaimed titles including Nova Swing and Climbers, alongside five short story collections and an “anti memoir”.
Judges assessed 163 submissions while seeking the standout 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 also drew attention this year, with his debut novel making the longlist.
The Dubliner’s All Them Dogs was one of three first novels included on the longlist.
All Them Dogs centres on Tony Ward, a young gangster who returns to Dublin after five years in England, determined to reclaim his footing in the city’s criminal underworld.
The Booker Prize’s roll of past winners includes Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernardine Evaristo, and Hilary Mantel, as well as Irish authors Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright and Paul Lynch.
