At 81, Harrison becomes the prize’s oldest winner. He received the £50,000 (about $67,000) award and trophy at the London ceremony on 9 November 2026, for his novel about survival after an unexplained disaster.
M John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, becoming the award’s oldest winner. The novel was his first Booker nomination. He received the £50,000 (about $67,000) award and trophy at the London ceremony on 9 November 2026.
Harrison surpassed Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the prize in 2019 for The Testaments. The Guardian detailed the result and the judges’ reasons for choosing his book.
Judging chair Mary Beard said the decision was unanimous after a full day of discussion. She said the novel unsettles readers and raises a wry smile, yet leaves a surprising twinge of optimism. She interpreted it as present-day politics viewed through a future in which catastrophe is incomprehensible and the old rules no longer matter.
The End of Everything takes place on the Kent coast a few decades in the future, years after a disaster nobody can properly explain. Phillip Tennent and his aging aunt Marnie try to survive under threat from the iGhetti: vast, shape-changing beings whose origins and intentions remain unexplained.
Harrison described it as “a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend”, with aliens arriving from another dimension in a parallel to the gentrification of places such as the UK’s southeast coast. He said he passed some of his characters’ confusion on to readers, while hoping the issues remained clear—including what he called “the collapse of rationality that comes with Trumpism and the internet”.
Guardian reviewer Michel Faber praised the book for exposing the insecurity of contemporary life, but warned that “it won’t be for everyone”.
Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood acknowledged that previous winners had written science fiction, but described Harrison as “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world”.
Harrison, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, sold his first story in 1965 and spent most of the 1970s running the books pages of speculative-fiction magazine New Worlds. His earlier awards include the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature for Climbers in 1989, the Arthur C Clarke award for Nova Swing in 2007, and the Goldsmiths prize for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again in 2020. He served as a Booker judge in 2022.
His fellow finalists included former winners Marlon James, shortlisted for The Disappearers, and Douglas Stuart, shortlisted for John of John. Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, Luke Kennard’s Black Bag and Rebecca Perry’s debut May We Feed the King completed the list. Each shortlisted author receives £2,500 (about $3,400).
The result also gives Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of independent publisher Profile Books, its first Booker win.
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