Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has become the oldest winner in the history of the Booker Prize, claiming the £50,000 award for his postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything. He received the trophy at a ceremony in London on Monday evening, surpassing Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the prize in 2019 for The Testaments. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, declared it "a historic win" because Harrison is "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world." While previous laureates dabbled in science fiction, none had come directly from that genre’s core community. This victory marks a rare moment of mainstream recognition for an author long revered by peers but situated at the margins of literary fiction.
A Baffling and Brilliant Narrative
The novel follows Phillip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie as they attempt to survive on the Kent coast several decades after a disaster nobody can properly account for. They face the looming threat of iGhetti, vast shape-changing beings whose origins and intentions are never explained. At 198 pages, the book was the shortest on the shortlist, which also included Marlon James, Douglas Stuart, Elizabeth Strout, Luke Kennard, and Rebecca Perry. Each of these other authors receives £2,500. Mary Beard, chair of the judges, stated that the panel reached a unanimous decision after a full day of discussion. She described the work as a book that "turns you upside down, raises a wry smile – and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism."
Harrison deliberately omitted background explanations to make readers feel the same disorientation as the characters. In a Guardian interview last week, he called it "a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend." He admitted passing on "some of the puzzlement and confusion of the characters" while hoping issues like "the collapse of rationality that comes with Trumpism and the internet" remained transparent. Critics have divided on this approach. Michel Faber praised the book for exposing "the terrifying insecurity of life right now" but warned that "it won’t be for everyone." The New York Times noted that the more readers learn about the broken world, the harder it is to grasp. One Telegraph critic found it "ultimately, in both skill and humour, a cut above" the other entries.
Career Context and Judging Details
Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, Harrison sold his first story in 1965 and spent most of the 1970s running the books pages of the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds. He has published 13 novels, five short-story collections, and the anti-memoir Wish I Was Here (2023). His previous awards include the Boardman Tasker prize 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 sat on the Booker judging panel in 2022 before entering this year’s competition. The current judging panel included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus, and Rebecca Liu. They considered 163 books published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
This win is the first for Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books, which has been nominated five times. David Szalay won last year with Flesh. On BBC Radio 4’s Front Row last month, Harrison said he had been "working for 40 to 50 years to shift the balance, both as a novelist and as a critic." He asked why a well-written work of science fiction should not be considered literary fiction. Beard noted that the "i" in iGhetti hints "at something digital, but you can’t be sure," while Wood described the landscape as "Large Language Model-dotted." The panel agreed on the final six only after what Beard called "hard work," with Lockwood admitting she had been "tossing books across the room" during sessions.
