British author M John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for his dystopian satire novel, The End of Everything, becoming the oldest winner in the literary award’s history.
The Booker judges unanimously selected the 198-page book on Monday, saying it can be read as a “thriller, a mystery, a satire, a dystopia, a road novel, a work of realism”.
The novel, whose themes of “catastrophe and apocalypse” chime with our uneasy times, is the first work of science fiction to win the prestigious literary award.
Harrison beat five other finalists, including previous winners Douglas Stuart and Marlon James. He was awarded the 50,000 British pound ($67,000) prize at a ceremony in London.
The End of Everything is set on the southeast English coast in the near future, after an unspecified calamity shattered society and brought an influx of enigmatic alien entities to Britain. It centres on a beachcomber who lives with his gun-toting aunt and discovers a puzzling, shape-shifting artefact on the shore.
“It’s a grim world, and it’ll keep on being grim. And it’s weird. But at the end of things, there may be some kind of – I wouldn’t say hope, or closure, but there might be some kind of relief,” Harrison said, when asked what he wanted to convey to readers.
The 81-year-old author is the oldest writer to win the Booker, two years older than Margaret Atwood when she won in 2019.
Previous winners also include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Arundhati Roy. Last year’s winner was Flesh by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay.
Critics have praised the book’s dark humour, though some have been confused by its elusive narrative.
Mary Beard, who chaired the judging panel, described the book as “the politics of now seen through the lens of the future”, saying it depicts a society grappling with a catastrophe its inhabitants do not fully understand.
“What he does is to say, when the catastrophe comes, you won’t know what’s happening,” the historian said. “And there are bits where you, the reader, are with the characters in not fully understanding. Now, I think that’s fantastically exciting.”
Harrison’s win marks a rare moment of mainstream recognition for the science fiction genre. He previously said he had 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?”
Beard said Harrison’s win was “recognition of what some people would see as the blindingly obvious, that you find great books in every genre.”
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to English-language novels from any country published in the UK and Ireland and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers.
