British author M John Harrison has become the oldest winner in the history of the Booker Prize, receiving the prestigious literary award at the age of 81 for his dystopian novel The End of Everything.
The writer, who has spent six decades working across science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction, was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Monday, November 9, taking home £50,000 and the Booker Prize trophy.
The title of oldest winner of the prize was previously held by Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she jointly won in 2019 with The Testaments.
Beyond his literary achievements, Harrison has also spoken out on political issues, including the Palestinian cause.
In January 2009, he was among the signatories of an open letter calling for a boycott of Israel following its military offensive in Gaza. The appeal urged the British government and public to support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Who is M John Harrison?
Born in 1945, Michael John Harrison is a British novelist and literary critic whose career began in the 1960s.
He sold his first story in 1965 and joined the influential British science fiction magazine New Worlds in 1969, where he edited its books pages until 1978.
Over the following decades, he developed a reputation for fiction that challenges conventional ideas of genre, often combining speculative worlds with philosophical questions about identity, perception and reality.
His novels include Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989, and Nova Swing, which received the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2007.
His 2020 novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again won the Goldsmiths Prize, an award recognising fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel.
Alongside his fiction, Harrison has worked as a literary critic for publications including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement.
Despite his long career, The End of Everything marked his first Booker Prize nomination.
His victory also makes him the first winner to emerge from the established science fiction literary tradition, according to the Booker Prize Foundation.
What is The End of Everything about?
Published by independent publisher Serpent's Tail, The End of Everything is Harrison's 13th novel and, at 198 pages, was the shortest book on this year's six-title shortlist.
Set on the Kent coast in a near-future Britain, the story follows Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber who makes a living collecting objects washed ashore, and his elderly aunt Marnie.
The world around them has been transformed by an unexplained catastrophe involving mysterious shapeshifting entities known as the iGhetti.
Government barely functions, familiar social structures have collapsed and the characters struggle to understand the strange new reality in which they find themselves.
When Phillip discovers an unusual object on the beach, events take an increasingly unsettling turn.
Harrison has said the book was partly inspired by the 2008 financial crisis and his interest in how societies respond to disasters they cannot fully comprehend.
"Current affairs provided the themes and the satire: what happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?", he told the Booker Prize earlier.
What the judges said
The 2026 judging panel was chaired by classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard, alongside poet Raymond Antrobus, musician Jarvis Cocker, journalist Rebecca Liu and novelist Patricia Lockwood.
They selected Harrison's novel from 163 eligible books, ultimately reaching a unanimous decision.
Beard described The End of Everything as a work that challenges readers while finding moments of humour and unexpected optimism despite its subject matter.
"One main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible. And the old rules won’t matter either. This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future," she said.
As the winner, Harrison can expect instant international recognition, a dramatic increase in global sales and a career transformed overnight. The winner of the Booker Prize 2025, Flesh by David Szalay sold over 7,900 hardback copies in the UK in the week following its win, a 1,441 per cent week-on-week sales increase, with combined e-book and audiobook sales in the same week totalling 15,000 copies, representing a 2,508 per cent increase, the Booker Prize said.
