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.
17. 2011 — The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
English author Julian Barnes, also a crime writer under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, won the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. “‘We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well.’ Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, Tony Webster and Adrian Finn swore to stay friends for life. Now in middle age, a lawyer’s letter proves that Tony’s memory may be imperfect.” | Getty Images
18. 2010 — The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
English writer Howard Jacobson won the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question. “Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked - and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes.” | Getty Images
19. 2009 — Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
English writer Hilary Mantel is another rare author to have won the Booker Prize twice - with her first win in 2009 for Wolf Hall. “England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?” | AFP via Getty Images
20. 2008 — The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Indian author Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger won the 2008 Booker Prize, with the novel adapted into a black comedy starring Priyanka Chopra in 2021. “Meet Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger’: servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer. Balram was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi at the wheel of a Honda. Amid today’s India’s cockroaches and call-centres, its 36,000,004 gods, slums, shopping malls, and crippling traffic jams, Balram learns of a new morality at the heart of a new India. Driven by desire to better himself, he comes to see how the Tiger might escape his cage… through murder.” | AFP via Getty Images