The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (Riverhead Books) won the £50,000 (about $67,195) 2026 Booker Prize. At 81, Harrison becomes the oldest author to win in the history of the preeminent fiction prize, with a writing career spanning 60 years.
Chair of judges Mary Beard said the panel "spent a whole day debating the six remarkable novels on this year's shortlist, before agreeing unanimously to award the 2026 prize to The End of Everything by M. John Harrison. It's a book that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile--and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism.... This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future."
Gaby Wood, CEO of the Booker Prize Foundation, commented: "Many past Booker Prize authors have borrowed facets of science fiction in their work, but M. John Harrison is the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world. He is a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously.
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| M. John Harrison (photo: Hugo Glendinning) |
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"The End of Everything is a novel that knows everything about the novel form, and exactly what it's doing when it breaks it.... It's a realist book about a strange world, populated by desperate, unmoored characters. This is a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page."
Booker organizers described the winning book as "a destabilizing and satirical dystopian novel that follows a beachcomber and his pistol-toting aunt as they eke out an existence together on a near-future Kent coast. Writing in short, filmic chapters, Harrison both leans on conventional literary forms and upends them, probing the limits of human understanding and letting the reader fill in the gaps."
Harrison's other books include Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989; Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007; The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize for innovation in fiction; and story collections You Should Come with Me Now and Settling the World.