At 81, British novelist M John Harrison has made Booker Prize history, becoming the award’s oldest-ever winner after taking the top honour for his dystopian sci-fi tale, The End Of Everything.
Set on the near-future Kent coast, the novel tracks a society sliding into collapse as a baffling invasion of shapeshifting entities takes hold. The Booker Prize Foundation’s chief executive, Gaby Wood, hailed Mr Harrison as “a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously”.
The End Of Everything emerged from a shortlist of six after deliberations 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 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. Last year’s winner, David Szalay, presented the award.
Described as “a dystopian satire that probes the limits of human understanding”, The End Of Everything was the briefest of the shortlisted titles, running to 198 pages.
The author, whose full name is Michael John Harrison, spoke about his nomination on BBC Radio 4, saying: “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 author Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she won the prize in 2019.
The result also delivers a first Booker Prize victory for the book’s publisher, Serpent’s Tail, following five nominations.
Ms Beard said the judges were of one mind when it came to selecting the winner. “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 praised the novel’s command of — and willingness to disrupt — traditional storytelling. “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 the course of his career, he has also produced award-winning titles including Nova Swing and Climbers, alongside five short story collections and an “anti memoir”.
This year’s judges assessed 163 books, seeking the best long-form fiction written in English by writers of any nationality, published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
Irish author Djamel White saw his debut novel recognised on the longlist.
The Dubliner’s All Them Dogs was one of three first novels to make this year’s longlist.
All Them Dogs centres on Tony Ward, a young gangster who returns to Dublin after five years in England, determined to reclaim 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.
