The 81-year-old winner of prestigious literary award
M John Harrison is the oldest ever Booker Prize winner
A post-apocalyptic novel has scooped the Booker Prize, making its author the oldest ever winner of the prestigious accolade - and beating competition from Scottish writer Douglas Stuart.
M John Harrison, 81, who has had a writing career spanning 60 years, won the prize for his book The End of Everything, which judging chair Mary Beard described as a “book that turns you upside down”.
Stuart was shortlisted for John of John six years after winning the prize for Shuggie Bain in 2020.
The End of Everything, the shortest book on the shortlist at just 198 pages and the first-ever Booker nomination for the author, is Harrison’s 13th novel; a dystopian satire that probes the limits of human understanding which he has said was inspired by the 2008 financial crisis.
Ms Beard, chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judges, said: “The Booker judges spent a whole day debating the six remarkable novels on this year’s shortlist, before agreeing unanimously to award the 2026 prize to The End of Everything by M John Harrison.
“It’s a book that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile – and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism.”
She said the book outlined a world where “social norms have been eroded, law and order have fallen into the hands of vigilantes”.
She added: “But one main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible. And the old rules won’t matter either. This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.”
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, told journalists at a press conference that the Booker Prize no longer uses the phrase “literary fiction” in its rules, opening the field to a wider range of genres.
She said: “Many past Booker Prize authors have borrowed facets of science fiction in their work, but M John Harrison is the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world. He is a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously.
“The End of Everything is a novel that knows everything about the novel form, and exactly what it’s doing when it breaks it. Readers will also recognise many tropes from cinema: the disaster movie, the road movie, the couple on the run, the noir heroine with a gun in her bag, the apocalypse.
“Though very unsettling, The End of Everything is not in fact a strange book. It’s a realist book about a strange world, populated by desperate, unmoored characters.”
She added: “This is a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page.”
If either Stuart or fellow shortlistee Marlon James had won, they would have become only the fifth ever author to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice, joining JM Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.
Also featured on the 2026 shortlist was Black Bag by Luke Kennard, May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry and The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Harrison, whose book is published in the UK by Serpent's Tail, will receive £50,000 and a trophy, presented to him by last year’s winner David Szalay, at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London on Monday night.
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