M John Harrison, 81, has become the oldest winner of the Booker Prize.
The “genre-defying” writer was awarded Britain’s most prestigious literary prize for his dystopian novel, The End of Everything.
The book, set on a near-future Kent coast invaded by mysterious shapeshifting lifeforms, has divided readers but was selected from a shortlist of six by a five-member judging panel as this year’s best.
Dame Mary Beard, a classicist and broadcaster who chaired the panel, said the science-fiction novel “stood out above all the other amazing, wonderful, and mind-blowing books we were looking at”.
And Booker Prize chief executive Gaby Wood praised the author as a “genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously”.
Mr Harrison, who judged the same prize in 2022, received £50,000 and a trophy presented by last year’s winner, David Szalay, during a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.
He also became the oldest winner of the prize, surpassing The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she received the prestigious literary award in 2019.
Ms Wood said the author, who has built a cult following over his 60-year career, was the “first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world”.
Dame Mary said the judging panel, which also included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus, and US novelist Patricia Lockwood, made a “unanimous decision”.
“It came out ahead in terms of both its extraordinary expert writing, but also its huge ambition,” she added.
As he accepted the award, a visibly shaken Mr Harrison said: “I really didn’t expect to be up here this evening. I honestly didn’t — here at the end of everything. But here I am.
“You talk glibly about your life being changed, but it’s weird when it happens. I feel like a proper writer at last: totally lacking in confidence.”
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Mr Harrison, from Rugby, has published 13 novels, five short story collections and what he calls an “anti-memoir”.
Writing in The Guardian, he said the novel came as he thought about disasters in fiction, which are often “bounded, understandable and, most importantly, solved”.
“This is not necessarily true of disasters in the real world; they’re constant, unmanageable, entangled with one another and with global politics; and wherever possible they go unacknowledged by people whose comforts are not immediately threatened,” he wrote.
He added that readers also face “some of the puzzlement and confusion of the characters” as they parse the text. One critic, in a positive review, admitted that “very little is clear in this book”.
The Booker Prize executive said the novel “knows everything about the novel form, and exactly what it’s doing when it breaks it”.
Ms Wood said: “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.”
She added: “This is a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page.”
The 2026 Booker Prize shortlist in full:
The End Of Everything by M John HarrisonThe Disappearers by Marlon JamesBlack Bag by Luke KennardMay We Feed The King by Rebecca PerryThe Things We Never Say by Elizabeth StroutJohn Of John by Douglas Stuart.
The panel considered 163 books and looked for the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1 2025 and September 30 2026.
Previous winners of the Booker Prize include Sir Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernardine Evaristo and Dame Hilary Mantel.
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