The winner of the Booker Prize 2026 has been revealed, with English author M. John Harrison becoming the first sci-fi author to win the prestigious literary award.
Also the oldest winner to date, the 81-year-old took home the £50,000 cash prize for his post-apocalyptic novel The End of Everything. Set on the coast of Kent in the years after a mysterious crisis caused the collapse of society in Britain.
Harrison was shortlisted alongside past winners Scottish author Douglas Stuart and Jamaican writer Marlon James, as well as nominees including Rebecca Perry, Elizabeth Strout, and Luke Kennard.
Since 2000, there have been 26 Booker Prize-winning authors - including Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood, both of whom have won the award twice.
With M. John Harrison the latest writer to receive the award, here are the 28 books which won the Booker Prize from 2000 to 2026.
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1. 2026 — The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
This year, M. John Harrison, aged 81, became the oldest Booker Prize winner for The End of Everything. The synopsis reads: "Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end. Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows. The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding from the peerless master of contemporary fiction.” | Maja Smiejkowska/Press Association
2. 2025 — Flesh by David Szalay
David Szalay became the first British-Hungarian writer to win the Booker Prize in 2025, following his first nomination in 2016. “Through chance, luck and choice, one man’s life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London… Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman – as his only companion. When a clandestine relationship begins between them, his life spirals out of control. As the years pass, István moves from the army to the circles of London’s elite. His competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth win him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.” | Getty Images
3. 2024 — Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Previous Booker Prize nominee Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for her work Orbital. “A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?” | AFP via Getty Images
4. 2023 — Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Irish author Paul Lynch's 2023 book Prophet Song won the Booker Prize that year. “On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.” | AFP via Getty Images