M John Harrison wins Booker Prize for The End of Everything at age 81
M John Harrison, 81, has won the Booker Prize for The End of Everything, a 198-page postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, receiving £50,000 and a trophy at a London ceremony on Monday evening and becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history. He overtakes Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the 2019 prize for The Testaments. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while earlier winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison is the first to emerge from the “bona fide SF world,” calling it a historic win for a writer whose decades of work sit lightly on every page. It was his first Booker nomination.
The book, the shortest on the shortlist, is set a few decades from now, years after a disaster nobody can properly explain. Phillip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie try to survive under the threat of the iGhetti, vast shape-changing beings whose origins and aims are never accounted for. Mary Beard, chair of the judges, said the decision was unanimous after a full day of discussion: the novel turns the reader upside down, raises a wry smile, and, despite its subject, leaves a twinge of optimism. Its point, she said, is that an apocalypse would be incomprehensible and the old rules would not matter — “the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.” Harrison has described it as a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend, with aliens as incomers from another dimension paralleling gentrification on Britain’s south-east coast, and with issues including “the collapse of rationality that comes with Trumpism and the internet.”
Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, he sold his first story in 1965, spent much of the 1970s running the books pages of New Worlds, and has published five short-story collections plus the “anti-memoir” Wish I Was Here (2023). Climbers won the Boardman Tasker prize in 1989, Nova Swing the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. A former climber and fell runner, he sat on the Booker panel in 2022. This year’s shortlist of 163 UK and Ireland titles (1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026) also included former winners Marlon James (The Disappearers, the bookmakers’ favourite) and Douglas Stuart (John of John), plus Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, Luke Kennard’s Black Bag and Rebecca Perry’s debut May We Feed the King; each shortlisted author receives £2,500. Fellow judges were Jarvis Cocker, Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus and Rebecca Liu. It is the first Booker win for Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books, and its fifth nomination. In a Guardian review, Michel Faber said the book “exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now” but “won’t be for everyone.” Beard noted that the “i” in iGhetti hints at something digital; Wood called the landscape “Large Language Model-dotted.” On BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Harrison asked why well-written SF should not be considered literary fiction.
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