Words by M. John Harrison has spent six decades writing books that bookshops never quite knew where to shelve. On Monday night in London, the 81-year-old won the Booker Prize for The End of Everything, and became the oldest winner in the prize’s history.
Harrison took the £50,000 award and trophy at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate, the former fish market on the Thames, with last year’s winner David Szalay handing it over, according to the Booker Prize Foundation. He passes Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the prize in 2019 for The Testaments. It was his first time on the shortlist.
The novel is short, 198 pages, the slimmest book in contention. It follows a beachcomber, Phillip Tennent, and his elderly aunt Marnie on a near-future Kent coast some years after a catastrophe nobody can explain: the arrival of shape-shifting beings called the iGhetti. Mary Beard, the classicist who chaired the judges, said the panel chose it unanimously after a full day of debate and described it as “the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.”
A science fiction writer, finally inside the tent
The win carries extra weight in literary circles because of where Harrison comes from. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said plenty of past winners had borrowed from science fiction, but Harrison is “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world,” The Guardian reported.
Born in Rugby in 1945, Harrison sold his first story in 1965 and spent much of the 1970s running the books pages of New Worlds, the British speculative fiction magazine. His earlier books won the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain literature (Climbers, 1989), the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing, 2007) and the Goldsmiths Prize (The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, 2020). He also wrote an “anti-memoir,” Wish I Was Here, and sat on the Booker judging panel himself in 2022. He told BBC Radio 4’s Front Row he had been working for 40 to 50 years “to shift the balance” so that well-written science fiction gets treated as literary fiction.
It is also a first for his publisher. Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of the independent Profile Books, had been nominated four times before without a win.
The rest of the field
Harrison beat a shortlist that included two former winners, Marlon James for The Disappearers and Douglas Stuart for John of John, along with Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, Luke Kennard’s Black Bag and Rebecca Perry’s debut, May We Feed the King. James was the bookmakers’ favorite. Each shortlisted author receives £2,500. The judges, who also included Jarvis Cocker, Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus and Rebecca Liu, read 163 novels published in the U.K. or Ireland between October 2025 and September 2026.
What comes next is usually a jump in sales. Szalay’s Flesh sold more than 7,900 hardback copies in the U.K. in the week after it won last year, a 1,441% increase over the week before, according to the foundation. Harrison’s first event as winner, at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle on Thursday, is already sold out.
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