Sci-fi veteran M. John Harrison takes top UK book award
The 81-year-old author becomes the oldest winner in the history of the Booker Prize with his novel The End of Everything.
By Carlos Rousseau ·
M. John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize, the top literary honor in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The award brings a 50,000 British pound cash prize, which is worth approximately 67,000 US dollars, to the British author. It also grants him a trophy presented by the previous year’s winner.
Harrison is 81 years old, making him the oldest author to win the prize since its inception. His career spans several decades and includes 13 novels. He is primarily known for writing science fiction, a genre that has rarely dominated this particular literary award.
The winning book, The End of Everything, is a satirical novel set in a post-apocalyptic future. The story follows a man named Philip and his aunt Marnie. They search for artifacts along the coast in Kent, England, while dealing with the slow invasion of shape-shifting beings called the iGhetti.
Mary Beard, who chaired the judging panel, described the book in a statement. She said the novel turns you upside down and raises a wry smile. She noted that it leaves readers with a twinge of optimism, which she found surprising given the subject matter.
Harrison told the Booker Prize team that current affairs inspired the work. He asked what happens when expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but people still have to make a life. His 2006 novel, Nova Swing, previously won both the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick awards.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, wrote that Harrison is the first winner to emerge from the bona fide science fiction world. She called him a genuinely original thinker and a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously. Past winners have borrowed from science fiction, but none had such a deep background in the genre.
The judging panel also included poet Raymond Antrobus, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, editor Rebecca Liu, and novelist Patricia Lockwood. Other books on the shortlist included Marlon James’ The Disappearers and Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say. David Szalay won the 2025 prize for his novel Flesh.
